[X4U] Low on Memory - I don't believe it

[Andrew Swanson]

On Mar 5, 2005, at 8:40 PM, Randy B.Singer wrote:

> Andrew Swanson said:
>
>> I'd like to see if other people agree with my conclusion here.
>> These are the symptoms:
>> 1) A couple of times lately, I've gotten the "Low on Memory" dialog.
>> The one that ask you to choose running applications to force quit and
>> free up virtual memory. The thing is, at the same time that this is
>> happening, the boot drive claims to have over 8GB free.
>
>
> How big is your hard drive?  Is it close to 80% full, or has it ever 
> been
> close to 80% full?
>
> See:
>
> http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html
> Item #5 and Note #2

As we will see, the second (occasional freezes) and third (rebooting to 
firewire drive and internal drive not mounting) symptoms I reported, 
while occurring less frequently turned out to be more critical clues.

The article sections Randy noted were interesting and I did break out 
some of my disk utilities and try to defragment. Unfortunately, Norton 
reported that there was a "disk error" and it could not proceed. This 
message was not very helpful. I then went to Disk Warrior and its 
hardware test said that drive's internal diagnostics reported the disk 
was about to fail or had already failed. (My worst fear was right - the 
disk was dying a slow painful death.) Fortunately, I had done a full 
backup before attempting to defragment. Actually, when I rebooted after 
getting this report, the disk failed completely. My poor old dual 
processor G4 is now in the shop getting a new (and larger) internal 
drive. :-(

Andy Swanson


-- 
GWB: What ELSE did he lie about?