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seanyepez · 05:15 AM

I'm having a problem with my 12-inch PowerBook. It's been on the blink ever since it crashed while installing Unreal Tournament 2003. Earlier, the Finder would quit and relaunch infinitely. The menu bar would show up and then disappear. Ironically, applications in my Dock worked and still work perfectly. I relaunched the Finder and restarted the machine several times to no avail. I tried fixing disk permissions with Disk Utility, too. Eventually, I reinstalled Mac OS X, but that didn't work, either. After reinstalling Mac OS X, my PowerBook launches a new, broken instance of Finder every few seconds. I've come to the conclusion that something is terribly wrong with the user directory. I tried mounting my PowerBook's hard drive on my iMac via FireWire, but my iMac won't mount its drive.

Please help me.

seanyepez · May 11, 2003, 05:14 AM

The PowerBook's disk finally mounted on the iMac, but every time I try to copy the PowerBook's user directory over to the iMac, the iMac's Finder crashes.

seanyepez · May 11, 2003, 06:31 AM

With a lot of help from "reader50," I was able to get the PowerBook working again. The fix involved deleting a lot of files and resetting a lot of permissions.

tikki · May 11, 2003, 12:02 PM

Post your results please. I suffered from the same thing you went through with the 10.2.6 upgrade

reader50 · May 11, 2003, 03:46 PM

The system locked up while in the process of copying UT2003demo from the mounted disk image to the Desktop. This resulted in a corrupted bundle on the Desktop that caused the Finder to quit whenever it tried to read it. I'm not certain exactly where the problem was, perhaps the custom icon file got cut in half.

Since the Finder would always try to read the user's Desktop on launch, it got caught in a launch-die-relaunch-die cycle.

The solution involved creating an alternate user account from Apple Menu -> System Preferences -> Accounts. Then going after the first User's Desktop in Terminal. Deleting the incompletely copied Demo.app folder solved the problem.

If Terminal had been in the Dock to begin with, the alternate user account could have been skipped. But it wasn't there, or in Recent Items. Since the computer in question was a 12" PB, it was not possible to do a quick boot into OS9 to fix it either. And the HD was not partitioned for repair purposes.

It's a pity the folder wasn't moved somewhere safe for analysis, this should be reported to Apple as a bug. The Finder should not crash when it encounters a malformed bundle.

mudzilla · May 11, 2003, 06:52 PM

having the same problem, except i don't get to see the dock, so i can't create a new user through the sys prefs control panel... and the system auto-logs on as the default user.

any suggestions?

hudson1 · May 11, 2003, 09:02 PM

Originally posted by mudzilla:
having the same problem, except i don't get to see the dock, so i can't create a new user through the sys prefs control panel... and the system auto-logs on as the default user.

any suggestions?

I don't know the odds of this fixing your problem but have you tried a file system repair at startup? If not, as soon you hear the boot chime, hold down Command and S keys until the screen goes black with a bunch of text. When the prompt appears, type 'fsck -y' (no quotes) and hit return. If the computer says that it fixed some errors, type the same thing at the new prompt. Once it runs without any errors, type 'exit' (no quotes) and see if it boots succussfully into the Finder.

reader50 · May 11, 2003, 10:41 PM

Originally posted by mudzilla:
having the same problem, except i don't get to see the dock, so i can't create a new user through the sys prefs control panel... and the system auto-logs on as the default user.

any suggestions?

You do not need the Dock to reach System Preferences.
Apple Menu -> System Preferences

mudzilla · May 12, 2003, 03:09 AM

tried fsck -y, first run fixed one thing, second run was clean, but still have the error.

secondly, the finder doesn't actually get to a point where i can click on the apple menu, so i can't get to sys prefs.

ssh'ing into the mac and running top shows a continuous LaunchCFMA (or whatever it is, can't remember precisely) followed by a crashdump.

looks like it'll have to be a reinstall. :/

rocky2 · May 12, 2003, 04:29 AM

I had the same problem on a G4 450 MHz. It was running 10.2.3 fine but problems started as soon as I upgraded to 10.2.5. (I had run fix disk permissions first to make sure the disk was in good order.) Within the first half hour, the Finder quit and relaunched no less than 5 times. I ran the fix permissions utility again but this did not fix the problem and then I started getting full blown nasty kernel panics--not the nice, 'its time to restart your computer in 8 languages' but just a screen full of kernel dump. At first, I thought the problem lay with some non-Apple RAM but pulling it did not fix the problem. Then we read about the USB hub bug and disconnected a hub from the keyboard. That seemd to fixed the kernel panics but not the Finder quits and restarts. Finally, 10.2.6 appeared and I ran it, but the damned machine kernel-panicked right at the end of the install leaving us with an unbootable machine--the gray splash screen with an Apple but nothing beyond that. In desperation, I booted the machine from the OS X CD and ran disk permissions. It took over 90 minutes to fix tens of thousands of disk permission errors--perhaps every file on the OS. A reboot then got us to the blue pre-Finder screen but no dock or menu bar would appear. We then tried booting into the Single user mode and running fsk -y but that ended with the same blue screen. In the end, it came down to a format and reinstall over. And this machine was OS9 and haxie free and had been given regular system maintenance over the prior months.
I am not sure what 10.2.5 and .6 did but they were an unmitigated disaster on this G4 450 (but everything was multiple backed up so no data was lost). On another machine (867), running 10.2.5 with a hub but not the Apple Finder (Pathfinder instead), everything has been perfectly stable.
So stable in fact that I will wait until 10.3 appears in the Autumn before dicing with 10.2.6 and any other interim point upgrades.

mudzilla · May 12, 2003, 10:13 AM

a re-install it is then. and i think i'll leave it at something like 10.2.3

thanks for the comments and help.

mudzilla · May 13, 2003, 03:26 AM

well, a re-install has not helped my problem.

the machine still hangs and crashes in the same place with a freshly wiped hard drive and fresh install.

this leads me to believe it's something on one the other two drives that is causing the problem.
the thing is, they mount fine in OS 9, and i've Diskwarrior'd and Disk First Aid'd them with no problems.

and suggestions?

i've not done the usual diagnostic of disconnect one drive and see which is causing the problem, that's for tonights bout of fun when i finish work...

mudzilla · May 13, 2003, 07:24 PM

alriiiiight...

removed the 2 other drives, so only left with 1 scsi boot disk.
removed 6 other RAM modules, leaving the 2 that, if any, were going to be fine as i bought them from OWC instead of "inheriting" them.
booted in 9 and low level/zero all data formatted that disk.
reinstalled 10.2 onto fresh disk.

same fscking problem.

tried booting in single user and fsck -y. no problems found

boot in verbose mode, no problems, goes through the whole process until the OS switches to the (problematic) blue screen, then stays there.

after reading a lot about stuff like this, i delelted the /Library/ dir to see if that'd make a difference.
well, it forces me into a login screen now, when it never used to. but then after entering my username and password, it freezes again.

this was a machine running 10.2.x for a few months now, with very few problem. all of a sudden. BANG. i can't get it to work at all, even from a base 10.2 install.

anyone?
bueller?!

mrtew · May 13, 2003, 08:28 PM

I doubt if this is your problem, but the new version of Silk causes that problem on my computer with a lot of fonts. Do you have the Silk Alpha or Beta installed?

mudzilla · May 14, 2003, 02:37 AM

i don't have ANYTHING extra installed, as after doing a fresh install, the machine won't boot up properly for me to install anything onto!

rocky2 · May 14, 2003, 06:14 AM

Mudzilla, is this happening with a fresh vanilla install of 10.2 with none of the subsequent point upgrades? If so, and you've reformatted to zeros, then I'd suspect a hardware (probably disk or RAM related) problem.
Or are you installing the 10.2 from a CD and then immediately running the point upgrade combo installer to 10.2.5 or .6?
If the latter, could it be that the combo update you downloaded (with Safari maybe) is damaged? The author (Dan Karelia?) of Watson has found a bug in Safari that results in a bad download being kept in cache. If you attempt a second download, what you get is the damaged cached version, not a new download. You have to forcibly flush the Safari cache to get a fresh clean download.
Hope this helps.
Personally, I'm sticking with any stable version of 10.2.3 or 4 until 10.3 appears. I'm sick of the bugs in 10.2.5 and .6.

willis · May 15, 2003, 02:29 PM

I can't offer any help for this problem as of yet but I have a FP iMac 700 exhibiting indentical symptoms to those described by mudzilla. This was a machine running 10.1.4 happily for months and months until I broke down and attempted this morning to install 10.2. The result? I log in and then the menu bar blinks on and off--no dock, no apple menu, nothing. Boots fine in OS9. I've fsck'ed, repaired from the Jaguar boot disk, and repaired from OS9 boot disk. Repeatedly. I've also deleted the finder prefs and the login window prefs along with the /System/Libary/Caches and ~/Library/Caches (as recommended by someone on an apple discussion forum.

I've reached my wits end. Upgrading to Jag was to be a favor for my wife (iTunes 4, iTMS, Safari, etc) but now her machine is useless.

Here's what I'm about to do. Zero all the data and start fresh. Will report results.

philzilla · May 15, 2003, 04:33 PM

Originally posted by willis:
I've reached my wits end. Upgrading to Jag was to be a favor for my wife (iTunes 4, iTMS, Safari, etc) but now her machine is useless.

ouch, that's gonna hurt in the bedroom

willis · May 15, 2003, 05:28 PM

Originally posted by philzilla:
ouch, that's gonna hurt in the bedroom

HA!

It appears that I'm back in the saddle, if you will.

I wiped the drive (did NOT write zeros), reinstalled jag and all is well. Not having learned my lesson, tomorrow I'm going for 10.2.6. Maybe. If I feel I've got the stones for it in the morning.

Unfortunately, I don't think this will help mudzilla who, if I recall, wiped the drive and reinstalled to no avail. Absurd that it had to come to this just to install 10.2