Mac Geeks fall in! Help!

Well, I’ve been stymied. I call on the blogosphere for assistance here.
I bought and built a purple gumdrop iMac for my mom about 4 months ago. This was to upgrade her from an ancient wheezing G3 running OS9 that was driving me nuts to maintain. This was my first experience with OSX, and I found myself liking it an awful lot.
Now comes the problem. I upgraded the machine to > 512meg of RAM and a 40gig HD, and installed OSX 10.3 on it. It was running fine up until a few weeks ago.
Now we can’t start the Finder. No desktop, no nothing. If we didn’t have the dock, the machine would be useless. Nothing I’ve tried has fixed it – neither starting the Finder from the command line (sorry, don’t remember the command we tried, but it resulted in a crash), nor running system update, nor running Repair Permissions. A reboot will return to the dock-without-finder. I’ve tried switching users, but the machine wedges when trying to get to the ‘select user’ screen.
I’ve tried moving the ~/Library/ tree out of the way and rebooting, no dice there either.
The last problem is… well, it’s at my mothers house. So working on it has to be limited to the 2-3 hours I’m there a week visiting. I’ll be there tonight (7pmish east coast time), and on IRC and AIM. If anyone wants to help me debug this, either drop a message here, or be around tonight while I’m at the machine. Let me know though so I can msg / mail / poke ya when I’m online again 🙂

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A wandering geek. Toys, shiny things, pursuits and distractions.

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12 thoughts on “Mac Geeks fall in! Help!”

  1. Mac help needed

    Dave needs a hand. He says… “Well, I’ve been stymied. I call on the blogosphere for assistance here. I bought and built a purple gumdrop iMac for my mom about 4 months ago. This was to upgrade her from an…

  2. I noticed you didn’t mention repairing the disc. You can do that from Disk Utility as well when you boot from the OS X install cd. If you haven’t done that, then I suggest you do that, repair priveleges again, and then reboot. If that doesn’t work, reinstall using the option to preserve the current users. If that doesn’t work, there’s likely to be a disk error. No need to panic yet. A backup and clean install should work if all else fails (other than the hard drive, which may be warranteed.) Looks like you aren’t able to be online on a separate machine, so I post this link to a more detailed article on O’Reilly’s Macdevcenter:
    Panther Maintenance
    It’s about mainanence, but it might help since the drive is fairly new. I’m not a certified tech, just a user who has seen many days using OS X, so be careful and backup if you can asap because you seem to be having a problem I’ve not seen before.

  3. Hi.
    Lisa Wilson posted a message on your blog.
    Try tossing the files in /Library/Preferences. Also toss /System/Library/Caches/ and /Library/Caches/ . Otherwise, I’m on AIM as jondt.

  4. Well, I did some work on it tonight. It think the only option that has a chance is to get media for 10.3.mumble and do an inplace upgrade. The machine is running 10.3.2 now, and nothing I’ve tried has cleared things up. I can’t even run Disk Utility on it, since I don’t have a finder or media.
    Ryan, thanks for the pointer, but I tried that as well. Even logged out and in as another user. I think we’ll just need to do an in place upgrade to basically update most of the binaries in place.

  5. Did this start with the 10.3.2 upgrade? If so, run the updater again. OS X updaters are smart enough to be able to be run twice without reinstalling the base system.

  6. Before you go reinstalling everything you may want to try booting with the shift key held down, this will do a ‘safe boot’ which loads only the base system software similar to OS9 extensions off, if this yields a healthy working finder you know something that’s been installed on the system is not doing well. if you have no luck there then you can boot into single user mode by holding the apple key and the S key together. from here you all you can really do is run fsck which will scan the hard drive for any problems. You could also use the diskutil command to run disk utility. Both of these options will tell you if there is a problem with the filesystem or hard drive media. Lisa, tossing prefs, and caches is an excellent suggestion but could be tough without the finder, but if you know your way around a unix shell it won’t be a problem from single user mode. If none of this provides you with any clues do an Archive install and preserve users and network settings and I suggest a custom install, deslecting everything but the ‘BSD Subsystem’ this will basically leave everything alone but the core system software fixing whatever ails yah, as well as making the install go much more quickly. –Ajax300

  7. Jon, thanks for your input. I’ve actually already done a lot of the things you suggested.
    I booted into ‘safe’ mode, which didn’t restore the finder (this from the page referenced way up above there by another user).
    I then booted into single user mode, and ran fsck on the filesystem, and got a “Your filesystem appears OK” message.
    The problem with Disk Utility is… how do you run it? I don’t have the media, and I can’t find it on the system itself. I’m planning on booting from 10.3.5 media and running Disk Utility.
    I also did the Cache and Prefs directory removals (remember I also logged in as another user, which would have used a totally different ~/Library tree).
    Hopefully I’ll have new media in a day or two and be able to try some things.
    Thanks for your input!

  9. You run the disk utility by
    1) Booting with the first installation CD
    2) Pulling down the top menu
    3) Selecting Run Disk Utility.

  10. Right, I understand that. The problem is I don’t have any media at all (the original install disks are packed away in storage now, in prep for the move), hence the waiting for new media part. I’m going to assume that Disk Utility doesn’t exist on a running system, and can only be run from installation media.

  11. Actually, Disk Utility is fully executable from the commandline.
    dyn231:~ macted$ which diskutil
    /usr/sbin/diskutil
    dyn231:~ macted$ sudo diskutil
    Disk Utility Tool ?2002-2003, Apple Computer, Inc.
    Utility to manage disks and volumes.
    Most options require root access to the device
    Usage: diskutil
    is one of the following:
    list (List the partitions of a disk)
    information | info (Get information on a disk or volume)
    unmount (Unmount a single volume)
    unmountDisk (Unmount an entire disk (all volumes))
    eject (Eject a disk)
    mount (Mount a single volume)
    mountDisk (Mount an entire disk (all mountable volumes))
    rename (Rename a volume)
    enableJournal (Enable HFS+ journaling on a mounted HFS+ volume)
    disableJournal (Disable HFS+ journaling on a mounted HFS+ volume)
    verifyDisk (Verify the structure of a volume)
    repairDisk (Repair the structure of a volume)
    verifyPermissions (Verify the permissions of a volume)
    repairPermissions (Repair the permissions of a volume)
    repairOS9Permissions (Repair the permissions for the current
    Classic boot volume)
    eraseDisk (Erase an existing disk, removing all volumes)
    eraseVolume (Erase an existing volume)
    eraseOptical (Erase an optical media (CD/RW, DVD/RW, etc.))
    zeroDisk (Erase a disk, writing zeros to the media)
    randomDisk (Erase a disk, writing random data to the media)
    partitionDisk ((re)Partition a disk, removing all volumes)
    createRAID (Create a RAID set on multiple disks)
    destroyRAID (Destroy an existing RAID set)
    checkRAID (Check a RAID set for errors)
    enableRAID (Convert a disk to a degraded RAID mirror set)
    repairMirror (Repair a damaged RAID mirror set)
    diskutil with no options will provide help on that verb
    dyn231:~ macted$

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