[Riddler]

My friend just installed the latest security update through SysPrefs and rebooted only to find the Finder is dead. The menu bar appears, re-appears, appears, re-appears in a loop.

He can launch apps in the dock like Safari and Entourage which work fine but without the Finder your pretty stuffed!

Disk Utility reports no problems, booting to single user mode and fsck'in says everything is fine. Attempting to re-lauch the Finder does nothing.

HELP!

[bergy]

[Try trashing finder prefs

user/library/preferences/com.apple.finder.plist

[Riddler]

But without the finder how does he navigate to that location and delete the file? "Open Terminal duh" but how does he run that when it's not in his Dock and he has no Finder to navigate to it!

Am I missing something?

Cheers

[docman]

Originally posted by Riddler:
My friend just installed the latest security update through SysPrefs and rebooted only to find the Finder is dead. The menu bar appears, re-appears, appears, re-appears in a loop.

something similar happened to me. my finder and SystemStarterResources bundle seem to have died. this, after installing the update and putting the computer to sleep for the night. except i got JUST the dock; applications could be launched, but nothing would happen. no title bar.

the problem was disk corruption, though, so if your disk checks out, you might be okay. back up critical stuff to be safe, though! i lost all active files: mostly, some Mail inboxes.

could have been worse, but if i'd have to bet, i'd say my sleep wakeup uncovered some race condition with apple's hidden "hotfiles" hfs feature in panther. or a bad journal replay. anyway. reformatting.

cheers..

[bergy]

You say he got to Disk Utility ... how did he get there?

After any update .. Repair permissions: Go to Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility and double click it. Then select your hard drive in the left panel and First Aid at the top. Then click on "Repair Permissions." It will take a few minutes.


See this document ...

Resolving Disk, Permission, and Cache Corruption
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/repairprocess.html

[Riddler]

He had Disk Utility in the Dock and was able to launch it from there, will get him to repair permissions later today and report back.

Cheers

[Riddler]

Well repairing permissions did nothing to help. He's going to come round on saturday and get into it over my network to delete the Finders prefs.

Think this is a bit of a floor in MacOS X, if the Finder gets messed up the non-geek users are stuffed.

[geekwagon]

Originally posted by Riddler:
Well repairing permissions did nothing to help. He's going to come round on saturday and get into it over my network to delete the Finders prefs.

Think this is a bit of a floor in MacOS X, if the Finder gets messed up the non-geek users are stuffed.

Same thing in Windows, if Explorer gets messed up (and I have seen it happen) you are pretty well stuck. So it's not limited to OS X. If you are at all familiar with the terminal you could boot into single user mode (no graphics) and delete them that way. Similarly, in Windows you could boot up to the emergency repair console.

Another option if another Mac is about is to boot up in target disk mode and mount the drive on the other Mac via firewire.