Mac Forum / General / Portable Macs / October 2007

I've never seen that and don't know how to approach this problem. Anyone
else?

The installer has a log which might reveal some details, but it may not
be available any more.

By "full freeze" do you mean that the mouse cursor stopped responding to
mouse or trackpad movement (pointer was frozen on the screen)?

That is usually a sign of a very low level problem, in the same ballpark
as a kernel panic, and probably due to a hardware fault, bad RAM or
corrupted system software or other kernel extensions.

I think that the PBG4/667 models use ADB to talk to the keyboard and
trackpad, and they are controlled by the Power Management Unit. This is
unlikely to stop communicating, except due to the main CPU getting stuck
somewhere in the kernel.

With later models, the trackpad is a USB peripheral, and this could be a
symptom of something causing USB to shut down or lose sight of the
trackpad. If the menu bar clock keeps counting but the mouse cursor
doesn't move, this is a more likely explantion. If the menu bar clock
has stopped, the kernel has got stuck.

In the case of a "spinning ball", you need to distinguish between one
application and the entire user interface having locked up.

In the case of an application lockup, the spinning ball will appear
whenever the mouse cursor is pointing to the menu bar or any window of
the frozen application. You should be able to click on the desktop, Dock
or another application window and other applications should still work.

If you are certain the application is stuck for good, you can try Force
Quitting it, which can be done from the Apple menu or with the
Command-Option-Escape key combination, or by clicking and holding the
mouse down on the stuck application's Dock icon then choosing Force Quit
from the contextual menu.

If the spinning wheel affects the entire user interface then this is a
similiar problem to the "frozen mouse cursor", but possibly at a
slightly higher level part of the system.

Either class of complete freeze can't easily be recovered without a
manual restart. (In the second case it may be possible to establish a
network connection to the computer from another one using ssh, and use
shell commands to force a logout of the current user, but this requires
a fair degree of knowledge, plus having Remote Login enabled before the
freeze.)