[PHoynak]

Last night on my iBook I was reading email and the mail program crashed. Then stuffit crashed on me...Then I noticed that my desktop was blank, no icons...nothing. The dock still worked but everytime I tried to run a program it crashed. When I tried to force quit the finder it wasn't even running. The time/date, isync and airport icons where still in the upper right hand corner but they were in dark black print. I called Apple and we tried the disk utility and it found errors each time (ran it 4 times)...I tried Disk Warrior and Drive 10 which bith said they found errors in the directory but the problem still exists. Apple said to wipe it and reload. I was able to boot into OS 9 and pull off my project for school .

The tech mentioned a possible problem with Safari...? But we never got that far...

Does anyone have any clue what the
happened??

[malvolio]

The first beta of Safari wiped data in some users' home folders, IIRC. Doesn't sound like what happened to you, though.
The fact that DiskWarrior couldn't repair the damage is not a good sign. If a second run of DW still can't fix things, then I agree that wiping your drive and reinstalling is your next step.

[PHoynak]

I did some looking around the Apple Support site and found the answer. I deleted the pref files (booted into OS9) for the finder and desktop and it seems to work ok now.

Next step is to back up...

What is the best disk utility to use? I need something newer than what I have...