[mauimac]

Hi folks,
I've searched the forums and came up empty for my particular case...hopefully someone has some insight...back in June I had a weird, new type of crash. It started out subtle as a printing problem..no app would print..I messed with the chooser, reinstalled printer diver, etc..then other weird things started to happen like messages about not enough RAM (B.S, there was plenty), unexpected quitting with type 3 errors, then lastly got a Finder quit/crash with the message "finder could not start up because a problem occurred initializing the following system library-ObjectSupportLib"...and after the restart I received the dreaded flashing question mark ...so I did a clean reinstall of 9.2 (I'm running 9.2/10 on a G4 867, haven't gone to 10 yet). Things seemed OK after that for a few days, then I got a strange type of crash where the program quit, showing only the top menu bar, no windows at all but the cursor could be moved around...however upon clicking to try to select something or shut down the whole screen just blinked/flickered..each time until I restarted. This happened several times. Then more finder/app crashes than usual until last week when the same printing problem came up, so I knew I was in for trouble...no ObjectSupportLib errors, but finally my programs just wouldn't open at all and instead gave the "unexpectedly quit" message when I tried to launch them. So yesterday I just did another clean install. So far so good, but I am still getting the same message I have had since the original crash when using Norton Disk Doctor...damage to the Alternate Volume Header Block. It let me choose to fix, but keeps coming up again with FileSaver. I see several places where it might be due to the OSX dual OS’s and Norton’s shortcomings…but I don’t know…why would there be the frequent, strange crashes in the first place? The only thing that came up with Disk Doctor was “custom icon missing 423356, 4726” and it was apparently repaired.
Now I'm at a loss...I just got Jaguar and want to install it and move to OSX finally, but will these problems from 9.2 haunt me? I’ve slimmed down 9.2, just installed the basic apps I need, but I wonder if and how the two OS’s are linked…will major problems from one affect the other? What would be the best course of action? I have no idea what a reformat involves or if it’s really necessary. I’m just about ready to call Apple it’s so frustrating!
Any help would of course be greatly appreciated! Mahalo!

[Eriamjh]

Your HD could be failing. Have you tried running diskwarrior?

If you have all critical data backed up, move to X and see what happens (although you might as well wait for Panther). If you can go trouble free in X (and you don't use classic much) you might be OK.

You may also want to partition your drive a few times, install one OS on each and see what happens.

[tooki]

When to reformat: when DiskWarrior can't fix it.

When to ignore Disk Doctor Kevorkian: 100% of the time.


The problems you are describing do not at all indicate drive failure. Instead, you just have some disk corruption and damage to the system folder.

Solution? Run DiskWarrior and then install a fresh copy of Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X (or both).

As for why your problems keep coming back... lemme guess, each time you clean install Mac OS 9, you put back Norton Utilities. Well, try leaving them out. I've found them to directly cause more problems than they solve (even more so if you aren't using a current version).

tooki