Imac G5 mysterious shutdowns and freezes solved

Fixing Imac

After I returned from Christmas vacation, my Imac G5 started acting up. It would freeze up or just shut down on me at frequent intervals. It also was putting out a lot of heat from the exhaust vent near the top and in the back of the computer/display. Sometimes, it refused to restart unless I let it sit (while still shut down) for 10-15 minutes. It was getting pretty annoying. I assumed that the hard drive was the problem and bought a new one. I put the new hard drive into an external case and began copying my data (you can see those trials and tribulations below). Once I finished the backup, I tried to repair my original hard drive with DiskWarrior. Either DiskWarrior would quit during the repair process or my computer would shut down during that process.

Still thinking that the original hard drive was the culprit, I unplugged and untethered my Imac of all cables and prepared it for surgery. With the display face down on a towel, I noticed something odd.

Fixing Imac

This is a picture of the cat hair, dust, and dirt that was clogging my intake port on my Imac and the source of all the heat buildup which led to shutdowns and freezes for weeks. That's a quarter next to it for scale. I have two cats in my home office and they used to perch right above the Imac which explains all the hair that gathered on the intake vent. Oh my god, what a pain! Well, I'm glad I found the problem and now my hard drive is backupped.

Fighting with Apple's FileVault

I've been trying to back up my hard drive for quite some time using Shirt-Pocket's Super Duper Back Up Software but my iMac G5 has not been cooperating. Turns out my FileVault disk image was damaged.

Let me back up and provide a brief explanation of FileVault (or VileFault as some like to call it). FileVault encrypts the contents of your home folder. It is available as part of Apple's system software OS 10.3 and beyond. When you need to use the encrypted data, FileVault allegedly decrypts it on the fly without too much of a hit to system performance. Apple, in its unquestionable brilliance, set the home folder as the default location for such disk hogging things as mp3s, photos, and movies. In my case, these items added up to about 200 gb on a 250 gb capacity hard drive.

When I went to back up my hard drive, Super Duper wouldn't do it because the FileVault disk image was damaged. So I next had to turn off FileVault. To do that, you have to have free space on your hard drive that equals the size of your Home folder because FileVault wants to create an unencrypted version of your Home folder and then erase the encrypted one. After moving all my multimedia, I had to shut off my Mac in order for FileVault to reclaim the space left by moving my multimedia files. FileVault takes forever to reclaim the space. Copying 200 gigs of info also takes forever. But I finally got it done and Super Duper did back up my hard drive.

I would recommend against using VileFault - more trouble than it is worth.