Console more or less keeps a running log in real time of all the
processes on your Mac.  Each event is time-stamped.  In my case I noted
several "disk 6s3 i/o error" entries, along with reams of other code I
do not understand at all.  I checked Disk Utility for clues but it does
not show the device ID of the drives, just what you named them so I made
the (incorrect) assumption "disk 6s3" was my boot drive.  Eventually I
discovered that you can open Terminal, type "diskutil list" and it will
return a detailed list of device ID's as well as their "names."  Aha.
"Device disk 6" was that faulty Firewire drive.

By the way, along the way I bought (again) Disk Warrior which was no
help at all, booted into Safe Mode and ran the RAM hardware test
overnight, bought MORE RAM in case the whole lot was failing, and backed
up then wiped clean an SSD for the clean installation of the OS. It was
an expensive and time-consuming experience but I learned a lot.

I have always shied away from Terminal; and never used Console in my
life before a couple of weeks ago. But it turns out that with some
digging around online you can find a load of useful troubleshooting
techniques that do not put your machine in further harm's way.

Robert W. Walker
Los Angeles CA USA

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [AE] Lesson learned
From: "Allen Ellis" <AE-List@media-motion.tv>
Date: Wed, July 09, 2014 10:20 pm
To: "After Effects Mail List" <AE-List@media-motion.tv>


Wow. Thanks for the story. Any more insight into how you used the console
to trace the problem to the disk i/o error? Sounds intriguing.

--Allen


On Wed, Jul 9, 2014 at 9:20 PM, Robert W. Walker <AE-List@media-motion.tv>
wrote:

About three weeks ago I went through a major day-and-a-half battle to
get a Mac Pro 5,1 on OS 10.9.2 to behave. I was getting bizarre Finder
crashes, infinite beachballs when trying to import any element at all
into AE, even Disk Utility freezing up.  I did a major update to my
backups, did a clean install of Mavericks and reinstalled all apps and
plugins one by one.  That took most of a day.

However the machine was still intermittently unusable, even to the point
of refusing to Shut Down properly.  Next thought was "bad RAM."  I
started removing and swapping RAM sticks until I narrowed it down to the
one that seemed to be the culprit. Bam. Looking good again.

Until today when the problem recurred. Long story short, through Console
I traced the problem to a disk i/o error on an external Firewire drive.
Console is pretty great. I took the drive off-line and everything was
back to normal.

Huh. Machines.

I learned that many symptoms can be caused by many things, not always
the most "logical" or the first thing that comes to mind.

Robert W. Walker
Los Angeles CA USA

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