WARNING: Saving PNG file with GIMP may brick mac mini!

By Digital M
in Apple (macOS)

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Digital M

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Yes, it's true. Here's the story. I was going about my normal business on my recently acquired mac mini. I had just downloaded the latest itunes update, and I was working with GIMP to create a lovely new work of art. Now since I had installed the itunes update I had restarted my mac. Everything came up as normal, well except for itunes, which refused to start up along with Bowtie. It was not really a concern for me at the time, because I was listening to my ipod with my headphones, so I had no real need for itunes(aside from seeing any updated changes). I really didn't think much of it. I was focused on creating a new masterpiece(haha) in GIMP. Upon completing a rough copy of my work I saved it to the standard XCF file. Then I proceeded to save it as a PNG. This is where the trouble began. Upon saving it became evident that GIMP was unresponsive. I thought to myself ,"No big problem." and selected to "force quit" GIMP. STILL NO RESPONSE. Then I attempted to log out, and again I was prohibited because of GIMP. So I manually shutdown my computer and rebooted it. However, upon restarting my computer it was left rendered useless at the apple logo only to me taunted with the spinning loading circle of eternity.

Anyway, I hope to find out the cause as soon as I can activate Disk I.(unfortunately, I have no current way of doing this until I find a USB keyboard(mine was bluetooth))

You guys have any guess on my problem(if so swing away it could be anything.)?

P.S. I'm not too concerned(It's still under warranty), I just thought I'd share the story.

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Digital M

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Looks like a gimp bug. Have the latest x11?

Originally when I downloaded GIMP and Inkscape the wouldn't even work. I asked around on here and someone gave me a link to X11, but I'm not sure how much the update. It's possible it was not up to date, but as far as I know it was current.

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Digital M

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can't you fire it up into verbose mode like with osx86 darwin i think by using -v for diagnostics of booting ?

Without a Keyboard?

Oh wait you can't even log in? I didn't read all the way through. Pop in your Leopard disc and boot from it and then run disk utility and do a disk and permissions repair.

A friend said something about using Disk 1 to run a diagnostics test first. I think I'm just going to wait until tomorrow to "fix" it. (I wish I had a USB keyboard around here...)

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Digital M

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You can use startup commands with the apple bt keyboard.

Hold down the option key with the 10.5 disc in the drive to select the boot device.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1343

That would be handy if I was using an apple bt keyboard, but actually I bought a Dell one off of ebay. :/ It's pretty cool though. I like it.

Sounds like a Hard Drive failure, it just so happened that you were using GIMP at the time that it occured, but would not be a GIMP problem (or else others would have reported it too)

Very well could be. I sure hope not. I had my homework on there! :(

Grand Master

SojIrOu

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this sounds like what happenend to me a while back when i was still using my mac mini. fortunately for me i had nothing important inside so i popped in the os x dvd and did a full wipe of my old installation. i have no idea how it happened or what caused it. it just sat at the apple logo for a long time and couldn't boot. surprisingly the hard disk was still perfectly fine when i reinstalled os x.

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Digital M

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My friend came over and we fixed the problem. The test results didn't find anything wrong with the hardware or anything else for that matter. I had to reinstall MacOS, but that's about it. Fortunately, I was able to save all my files. I'm not really sure what went wrong, but my guess is that it had to do with either X11 or GIMP. The newest itunes update installed and itunes and my mac work fine, so that's why suspect GIMP or X11. Either way, it's working and I'm glad I don't have to send it in. The one thing I am frustrated about yet is that my printer was working just fine before and now it can't find the right driver. It's an Epson Stylus CX3810 if anyone has any suggestions.

Proficient

Mercellus

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I think it's more the Hard Shut Down that crashed your Mini.

It just append to have been done after the Gimp bug.

I'm thinking the hard shut down could have somehow damaged the directory structure on the hard drive, which can cause lots of weird issues (even if HFS+ is a journalized file system, I hate hard shut downs).

Grand Master

The_Decryptor Veteran

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Yeah, something else happened there.

I had a similar situation, Firefox locked up and I tried to end it, didn't end so I tried logging off, couldn't log off and the system froze, restarted and it just sat on the Windows logo, turns out my hard drive controller had chosen that exact moment to end it's life.

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