[chrisford]

Hi all -

Quick question / issue to see if anyone can help...

I have a dual 450g4 running 10.3.3. It's been running happily for months now, with no crashes of any sort.

Odd situation: I have two hard drives, each with three partitions. I want to use the machine as a file server for two 12" powerbooks. So I get info on the main partition, set me as Read and Write and Guest as Nothing (no access). I was about to select the partition I want to share when I closed the Info window.

At this point, the desktop 'flickered' and the first partition (the one I had just changed) disappeared. The mouse still worked and when I drag selected the space where the HD icon used to be it 'kind of' appeared - but as tho' the name was a space, or something?

When I selected any of the other five partitions, they disappeared as well.

The dock was there and apps were selectable and usable. The finder however just seemed to have gone! Right-clicking the Finder icon in the dock did nothing.

Oh well, I thought, and re-booted. The machine booted ok until it hit the blue desktop colour. And then it did nothing. No dock, no icons, no nothing.

I'm repairing permissions now.

Has anyone come across this? Am confused...

Thanks!

Chris

[CharlesS]

Try running DiskWarrior on the drive.

[Xeo]

Let me get this straight, you set your boot partition to have no read or write access by anyone? Your user can't launch the Finder (or anything else) if it can't read them.

Repairing permissions should fix whatever you did.

[chrisford]

Hi CharlesS and Xeo -

Thanks for your reply - a Disk utility repair seemed to fix it.

Xeo - I'd made my account Read and Write and Guest as no access: I'm being very dense here, but I'd assumed that this would mean that when looged in as me, I could access the drive, but when logging onto the Mac from a Powerbook as Guest, the drive would be inaccessible?

This whole thing confuses me. Ten years of Mac use and I still can't get a simple network going..!

Altho' I have got it sorted now. Ish.

Thanks -