What is the equivalent of Event Viewer in Leopard - notebook hanging during shutdown

In my old Windows days, if the OS hanging during shutdown, I can do a hard boot (press and hold the power button) and when Windows boot up again, I can check Event Viewer and see what was the problem.

In Leopard (I have the late 2008 MacBook Pro), where is the equivalent of this?

I am having problem during the shutdown and Leopard 10.5.5 would hang at the shutdown screen (where there is no icons on the desktop). No circling beach ball, just hang there.

 

Go to /Library/Logs/ and there are a couple of types of logs in there.

PanicReporter is usually when the computer has a kernal panic
HangReporter is when an application freezes
CrashReporter im not sure about.

But the files in there will have the datestamp on the filename, and then just open them up with a text editor to see the details.

It might be a bit cryptic, but if you look for keywords you might be able to find what is causing the crash (eg for me, it used to be my esata card, and it is made/drivers from siliconimage. in the panic report, siliconimage, is mentioned, therefore i know thats what caused the panic.)

Hope that helps, although like i said, it is a bit cryptic.

 

Here's what I see:

1) CrashReporter: EMPTY - no log
2) HangReporter: EMPTY
3) PanicReporter: 1 entry from 1 month ago

I also looked at Console Messages and there's nothing there. The problem is, the hangs occured during the shutdown process, so maybe nothing is logged in Log File? Any other way to check this?

I know Vista always record pretty much everything in Event Viewer...

 

how long does it hang for? is it just a couple of minutes, or like 15. how often?

 

It hangs indefinitely and on and off. The longest I waited was 20 minutes and it still hang, so I just forced hard reboot.

I've been trying to duplicate this problem but couldn't, as it happend on and off. The program that I used the most are:

- Entourage
- VMWAre Fusion 2.0 (latest)
- Firefox
- iTunes

This program pretty much ON before I shutdown.

I have a feeling it's VMWare Fusion, because that's the one that have the most background services (USB, Network bridge, etc.).

 

I've had that happen to me before, although not nearly as frequent as you are reporting.

When you close out VMWare before shutting down OSX, go to the Apple Monitor (search for it in the spotlight tool) to see if it is still running in the background. If it is, you might just need to do a clean install of VMWare Fusion 2.0 (no need to delete the actual VM's you have though).

Then there's the update for 10.5.6 update for OSX that you can try...

 

I know that if you have VMware open with windows, it will cancel shut down or restart. So make sure it's windows is shut down first. It might be screwing it up some how.

 

give Onyx a run with all its automations checked.

Let it see if it can fix something.