[raster hippie]

my friend installed keyboard builder 0.4 on his imac earlier in jaguar to attempt to remap some of the keys on his keyboard. it told him to make a new folder in his library called "keyboard layouts" and drag the program in there, but he didn't know how to actually use the program, so forgot about it. a few hours later, while extracting a .dmg file for another piece of software, disk copy unexpectedly quit. so he decided to restart his mac and try again (he hadn't restarted in about 2 weeks).

but upon startup.. ever single application he tried to open immediately unexpectedly quit. then the finder quit. and he tried restarting two other times and the same thing happens every time he starts up. so there's no way to access the crash log, or to uninstall the keyboard builder program we think may have triggered the crash.

so he attempted to install panther, as he had the cd's for it, thinking maybe that would clear up the problem. he installed it as an upgrade and it seemed to install fine, but the exact same thing is still happening.. everything including the finder unexpectedly quits on startup. actually.. the only thing that stays open is the dock, for some reason.

he can get to open firmware.. but neither of us know what, if anything, we can do from there! is there any way to uninstall the trouble application or check the crash logs from the OF screen? or any other suggestions for what we can do?

thanks in advance!

[CharlesS]

I can't promise this will help your friend at all, but it worked on a machine belonging to someone I talked to a long time ago who was in a similar situation. It's worth a shot.

Boot into Single-User Mode (Command-S at startup) and type these commands in succession:

fsck
mount -uw /
update_prebinding -root / -force
reboot

See if that helps at all. The thing is that sometimes if an installation gets interrupted while it's updating the prebinding, in really rare cases the prebinding information can get corrupted, preventing anything from launching correctly.

[raster hippie]

thanks for the advice! i have emailed him your post (he can get email on his phone), so when he tries that out we'll see if that was the problem. i hope it was just something simple like that.

[Mark E]

hello.

i am the 'friend'... (thanks for posting this, cheryl).

and, let me tell you, my imac is ****ED.

firstly, i tried the fsck thing mentioned below. no joy.

i rang apple techsupport who advised me to run disk permissions/repair (no luck), then do an archive install of panther (still no luck).

they put me on hold like three times to go and check with other people what the problem was, and the final answer was to format my hard drive and do a clean install. great!

so now i've just ordered a hard drive for my firewire drive case (which i'd been meaning to do anyway for a long time), and as soon as i get that, i can (hopefully) boot from the FW drive, copy over all my data to that, format and re-install panther on my internal drive, move everything BACK over from the FW drive, and save my sanity.

so, yeah.. DON'T USE KEYBOARD BUILDER!

[CharlesS]

I severely doubt that adding a keyboard layout could cause the problems you're having; it's probably coincidental.

Did you try force-updating the prebinding like I suggested? It's not fsck that's the idea - fsck in this case is just standard protocol before mounting the drive read-write in single-user mode. It's not much, but it's fixed this for at least one person I talked to before.

Do you have DiskWarrior? If your drive is really messed up, it often works wonders.

[Mark E]

Originally posted by CharlesS:
I severely doubt that adding a keyboard layout could cause the problems you're having; it's probably coincidental.

thanks for your help, but i got it sorted out.

i went through the single-user command line (hold down option-s at startup), and deleted the files that the keyboard layout program had made. then, i rebooted... and everything works again.

so, i guess it must have had SOMETHING to do with the keyboard layout program..

thanks anyway