Quicktime 6 Causes Total Freeze

[sheich0608]

Hi all,

I just installed OS 9 from the universal CD image found on the forum to my iMac G4 800 Mhz that I just got. Little background first-I am a student doing summer research at DePauw University in Indiana, and having some experience with older Macs, decided to use this desktop as a (relatively) distraction-free machine with which to read journal articles in PDF form and do some basic word processing. To those ends, I installed Acrobat 5.1 and Appleworks 6. I also went through and updated any software included with the disk image that wasn't at it's latest iteration. This included updating Quicktime 4 to 6. I downloaded a copy of Quicktime 6 from Macintosh Repository (url:https://www.macintoshrepository.org/2473-quicktime-6-0-3).

I've been using a 16 GB Sandisk USB flash drive to transfer files to the iMac from my MB Pro (just faster), and when I tried to unpack the Quicktime .smi file (directly from USB, as I had for most of the other programs), it froze the entire system. It was a total freeze, not even the mouse cursor would move. I have read that freezes on OS 9 are often caused by RAM issues, but in most of those cases the mouse would still move. In addition, it certainly seemed to be triggered by me opening the installer file. I did a forced shutdown, and tried opening the file again, and this time it did unpack and install. However, when I opened the Quicktime folder and tried to launch the Quicktime updater, I got a message saying that "Quicktime had not been installed correctly", making me suspicious. I then tried to open the sample movie, and the system did another total freeze. After forcing a shutdown a second time and rebooting, I was greeted with the Quicktime preference assistant (or whatever it's called) that asks questions after an install. I tried relaunching the Quicktime updater to see if I would get the same error, but this time it just complained about some server issue, which made more sense. The sample movie also opened fine.

Sorry for the long-winded explanation. My questions are:

1) Does anyone know why this would have happened?

2) Is this serious to the stability of the OS? Should I reinstall the OS, or is everything fine?

I know that OS 9 sometimes freezes (like any OS), but given it's reliance on extensions, I didn't want mess with any possible system fragility. Is this Quicktime thing really a problem?

Thank you for any help!

-Sam

[GaryN]

I also went through and updated any software included with the disk image that wasn't at it's latest iteration. This included updating Quicktime 4 to 6. I downloaded a copy of Quicktime 6 from Macintosh Repository (url:https://www.macintoshrepository.org/2473-quicktime-6-0-3).

Without knowing anything at all about any possible odd interactions between your hardware, install, and QT6…

Troubleshooting is a straightforward, logical process. The first thing you need to do is revert to QT4 while removing all remnants of QT6 to determine if the problem lies in this QT6 update. Honestly, the best, most certain way to do that is to reinstall the OS from scratch because it's hard to be 100% certain you "get" any and all QT extensions, pref files etc that were changed with QT6. Yeah, you'll have to do the other updates again too, but it's easy the second time around.

Why do this? Because the messages you're getting, while irritatingly vague, do say something's wrong with QT6. That may well be a flaw in the Repository download. Much (very much) of the MR content was copied over from Macintosh Garden, but not necessarily all of it and there's no way to tell for sure where this QT 6.0.3 came from.

So, logic says: go back, run QT4, make sure everything works properly, then grab another copy of the QT6 update from Macintosh Garden where we at least know a "good" copy of QT6 resides. If that works, you can either assume the MR copy is corrupt, or you can satisfy curiosity by grabbing a file inspector app and comparing the two bit for bit.

The possibility does exist that there's nothing wrong at all with the software and something went wrong during installation but to get to that conclusion you must first verify the software itself. The goal is to eliminate possible culprits one by one. There is also a possibility of a conflict caused by doing all those updates of different thing all at once. I suggest doing the QT6 update first, verifying it works, then do the rest one by one, checking for problems each time rather than "shotgunning" everything at once.

To your last question, NO the Quicktime "thing" is not normally a problem.