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Rinpoche · Jan 29, 2003, 09:26 AM

Can someone explain to me the difference between 'verifying disk permissions' and 'repair disk permissions'? I've been getting a lot of 'this program has unexpectedly quit' message from all sorts of programs that crash for no apparent reason. I called apple and the guy told me it's most likely due various internal software issues conflicting with each other. he told me to use disk repair and select the 'repair disk permissions'. Well i did that, but various programs still crash on me at the most random moments. So I dont know if repairing disk permission did anything.

Just this morning I was searching for something on the internet and it crashed. I really think something is wrong because I thought OS X was super stable but its not on my computer. I own a superdrive tibook. Is anyone else experiencing this? Probably not. When I check in the system logs, there is a big long list of prgram crash history. The list is long. Most of the crashes are due to kernel errors whatever that means. Hope someone can help. Thanks

chris v · Jan 29, 2003, 09:31 AM

"verify" will just check your permissions without changing anything, and report what it finds. "Repair" will fix whatever is out of whack.

Just run "Repair..." It just about invariably will find something wrong and fix it.

CV

Rinpoche · Jan 29, 2003, 09:42 AM

i have run "repair disk permissions' several times now after I spoke with the apple techperson. my programs STILL crash though! this is driving me nuts!

tooki · Jan 29, 2003, 09:45 AM

Then permissions aren't the cause of your problems!

tooki

Preciousss · Jan 29, 2003, 08:17 PM

Originally posted by Rinpoche:
I thought OS X was super stable but its not on my computer. I own a superdrive tibook. Is anyone else experiencing this? Probably not. When I check in the system logs, there is a big long list of prgram crash history. The list is long. Most of the crashes are due to kernel errors whatever that means.

You know I was just about to post a topic about how the whole "bulletproof OS" thing just hasn't been applying to me. I also have a 1GHz, Superbook (with 1GB RAM and I haven't installed much in the way of drivers or freaky 3rd party software). In terms of "clean and neat" computer usage, I've been pretty good.

I too have an extensive and varied crash log list. And it's not as if I'm pushing the machine at all. It's just over a month old--I updated to 10.2.3 pretty immediately too. I'm wondering if I need to roll back. I especially have been getting a lot of kernel panics since I created a non-admin user and have been switching back and forth between it and the admin account. I know, I know, well-documented, try GlobalPreferencesLocker, blahblahblah.

Then there's the whole dead trackpad on wake thing. Very disappointing. Nevertheless, I love my Mac and OSX is still pretty sweet. The whole bulletproof claim just hasn't proven true with me so far.

(Wondering if I'll get flamed now by any fanboys...)

malvolio · Jan 29, 2003, 10:06 PM

Those "unexpected quits" are more likely to be caused by corrupted cache files. These are located in /System/Library/Caches, /Library/Caches and ~/Library/Caches. You can delete them in the Terminal, or try one of the utility programs that will do this for you (just search versiontracker.com for "cache").

TheIceMan · Jan 30, 2003, 12:03 AM

Preciousss
I love my Mac, but I let reason rule instead of temperament so don't worry about being flamed. You are only stating your own experience with OSX. I'm no expert at fixing software or hardware by any stretch of the imagination, but hang around this forum and the retail Apple store enough to pick up a few things. So I'm not that incompetent.

Sorry, I digress. First, have you tried running it through DiskWarrior? The Apple tech guys told me that doing this every once in a while helps to "put things back in place." Because Diskwarrior will (I believe) reconstruct/restructure/rebuild your hard drive. Secondly (and I know this takes time), if all else fails do a clean install. I have done both and things seem to work fine now. I had some kind of very minor system glitch that was really annoying me, forgot what it was. Eventhough my machine ran fine I just had to rid my PowerBook of it. I took it in, the Apple guys put in DiskWarrior and 20-30 minutes later things were fine. Another time the clean install corrected a problem I had from using themes. Hope that helps.

becca · Jan 30, 2003, 09:24 AM

see this thread. I posted to on how to run file system check

Arkham_c · Jan 30, 2003, 10:43 AM

Originally posted by Preciousss:
Then there's the whole dead trackpad on wake thing. Very disappointing. Nevertheless, I love my Mac and OSX is still pretty sweet. The whole bulletproof claim just hasn't proven true with me so far.

(Wondering if I'll get flamed now by any fanboys...)

No flames from me. I had the dead trackpad issue. Luckily I found a post somewhere on Macintouch that told how to fix it -- and it worked.

Here's what you do:

1) Delete /Library/Preferences/com.apple.PowerManagement.plist
2) Shutdown
3) Start up, and on boot zap PRAM twice (command-option-P-R)
4) After second reboot, hold command-option-O-F to boot into Open Firmware
5) type:
reset-nvram <return>
reset-all <return>

Your mac will reboot on reset-all and hopefully the dead trackpad on wake problems will go away (mine did). Good luck.