[russhack]

I have been searching the net and have found many different answers on how to solve my problem, but none work. My problem is that Finder will not load at all when I turn on my mac. It worked when I went to sleep last night, but when I woke up, it was not. I am running 10.3.9. I have my Dock, but I don't have the menu bar on the top of the screen. I can get the bar if I open safari or another program. I have none of the files I keep on my desktop or the Harddrive. I deleted the preference files for Finder. I used the Install disk to do the disk repairs. I even did the fsck -f from the terminal. I've tried to restart finder by right clicking on the icon in the dock, but sometimes the option isn't even there. Sometimes when I go to Force quit, there will be two finder processes in there. I can only select one. The other just flashes. I am trying to figure a better way than taking the route of just simply reinstalling the OS. I want to understand the problem and do a good job, if it is at all possible. One guy suggested deleting the Caches folder. I did that. It didn't work either. I want to try everything besides a reinstall. If it comes to that I'll do it.

[cms]

I had exactly the same problem on a G4 Dual a few months ago. None of the supposed fixes I tracked down on-line had any effect whatsoever, and in the end I had to do a complete wipe and reinstall. Not such a big deal -- just parked the data on an external firewire drive, zeroed the hard drive and did a clean install of Panther. Happy to report that the machine has been absolutely fine since then. If anyone knows anything at all about why this happens, I'd be really interested to know.

[rickey939]

Archive & Install.