[Rangers4me]

My Mac spazzed this morning and the finder just completely dissappeared. When I reboot, the finder doesn't load. Once its booted up, if I click on the finder, it boots up for a second then disappears. I've repaired the disk, repaired permissions, reinstalled 10.3.7, reset the PRAM and NVRAM, and now I'm at a loss. I don't want to reformat and reinstall OSX because its a pain to put everything back on the machine. Any suggestions?

[CharlesS]

Do you have the Terminal in your Dock, or Path Finder or any other app that we could use to get the console open and look at the crash logs?

If so, I'd launch Console.app, which is in /Applications/Utilities, and then try to launch the Finder and see if anything shows up in the Console.

Otherwise, I'd boot to verbose mode, by doing the following:

1. Log out so you're at the login panel.

2. Hit the down arrow key on the keyboard.

3. Type Option-Return.

4. For username, type >console (with the greater-than sign in front). Leave the password blank.

5. You'll get dropped to a BSD login screen. Log in as the user for whom the Finder won't launch.

6. Enter the following commands:

more /Library/Logs/Console/<your username>/console.log

more /var/db/system.log

7. For each of these commands, you'll get a bunch of text on the screen. Jot down anything related to the Finder.

Either way you manage to get the info, post it here. Also, if you could get ahold of the Finder crash log and post that, it could be helpful as well. (it's in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/Finder.crash.log, and if you can get ahold of it and copy and paste it, that'd be great. Copying it by hand might take a while, though...)

[CharlesS]

Argh, obvious realizations...

Before you do anything I posted above, I'd go into System Preferences and create a new user account. Then log into that account, and see if the Finder still crashes. If it works fine, something's up with your user account. If it still crashes, something's up with the Finder. In the latter case, you may want to just reinstall the OS - if you select the Archive and Install feature in the Installer, you'll get a clean installation, but all your applications, files, etc. will be intact, and you won't have to reformat your disk or restore any data - this isn't Windows.

If it works fine for other user accounts, though, something's wrong with your user account, and reinstalling the OS likely won't fix it. So in this case, follow the directions I posted above to get the crash logs, and we'll see if we can figure out what's going on. However, if you can get into another user account, you can get into the Terminal from there and type these commands to get the crash logs:

su <your normal user name (not the newly created one)>

more ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/Finder.crash.log

more /Library/Logs/Console/<user name>/console.log

more /var/log/system.log

This way, you can just copy and paste stuff out of the Terminal instead of having to write it down.

[CharlesS]

One last thing, if you want to just try something easy before getting all the logs, you can try trashing the Finder prefs. This can be done, in verbose mode, like so:

cd ~/Library/Preferences/

mv com.apple.Finder.plist ~/.Trash

Notice that Trash has a dot before it here.

(yes, we could just use rm, but I like to be cautious)

Also, you can try trashing the LaunchServices caches (you'll need to be an admin to do this):

cd /Library/Caches

mv com.apple.LaunchServices* ~/.Trash

Please take care NOT to put a space before the asterisk.

[Rangers4me]

Thanks for the help. This morning, I ended up trying one more thing, before I went through your steps. I download theme changer, and used Aqua Restore, and miraculously the finder was restored. Hopefully this is a permanant and not temporary solution.

Thanks again