G4 Freeze Your Computer Needs to be Restarted

Was having all sorts of problems with my G4 17″ Powerbook today and last night, thought I would give this a try.

Thanks to Tech Support Technician “bobw” at Macosx.com

  • First disconnect anything connected to the machine (printer,modem, scanner, etc) and see if the Kernel panic still happen. (‘your computer needs to be restarted’ in various different languages is a Kernel panic)
  • Next, run Disk Utility from your Utility folder to Repair Permissions.
  • Next run ‘fsck’;

To run fsck, you first need to start up your Mac in single-user mode. Here’s how:

  1. Restart your Mac.
  2. Immediately press and hold the Command and “S” keys.

You’ll see a bunch of text begin scrolling on your screen. In a few more seconds, you’ll see the Unix command line prompt (#).

You’re now in single-user mode.

Now that you’re at the # prompt, here’s how to run fsck:

  1. Type: “fsck -f” (that’s fsck-space-minus-f).
  2. Press Return.

    3. The fsck utility will blast some text onto your screen. If there’s damage to your disk, you’ll see a message that says:

    ***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****

    If you see this message–and this is extremely important– repeat running fsck. It is normal to have to run fsck more than once — the first run’s repairs often uncover additional problems..

    When fsck finally reports that no problems were found, and the # prompt reappears:

  3. Type: “reboot” to restart, or type “exit” to start up without rebooting.
  4. Press Return.

    5. Your Mac should proceed to start up normally to the login window or the Finder.