Mac troubleshooting help
April 26, 2004
Recently, I have become reacquainted with my old friend Pine. Who needs fancy graphics or colors for e-mail?
I should point out that this is not a result of my choice, but rather the result of some kind of protest by my computer to running mail.app. Fortunately, I can still work in Word, OmniOutliner and Safari. But why did my computer decide that right now, on the cusp of finals season, is the best time to go crazy? No tv and no beer? The little dude didn't enjoy the last time it went drinking...
Here's what's happening:
Mail.app, iChat and iCal refuse to launch. They will bounce in the dock for a long time. Activity Monitor shows that they are running, but they do not show up in the command-option-esc force quit menu.
I have run fsck, repaired permissions, run DiskWarrior and cleared system caches. None of these have fixed the problem.
What's going on here?
Posted by Andrew Raff at April 26, 2004 01:43 PMtry re-installing OS X, but be sure to save your settings. then if that doesn't work, re-install again and don't save settings ( i forget what this is called, but it will place your settings in a folder and the rest of the computer will look brand new). do the second recommendation last. call the help line or go to the online support. they're pretty helpful.
and check out my link where i tout the love of Macs.
Posted by: anna on April 26, 2004 10:30 PMtry re-installing OS X, but be sure to save your settings. then if that doesn't work, re-install again and don't save settings ( i forget what this is called, but it will place your settings in a folder and the rest of the computer will look brand new). do the second recommendation last. call the help line or go to the online support. they're pretty helpful.
and check out my link where i tout the love of Macs.
Posted by: anna on April 26, 2004 10:32 PMtry re-installing OS X, but be sure to save your settings. then if that doesn't work, re-install again and don't save settings ( i forget what this is called, but it will place your settings in a folder and the rest of the computer will look brand new). do the second recommendation last. call the help line or go to the online support. they're pretty helpful.
and check out my link where i tout the love of Macs (at the bottom of the page).
Posted by: Anna on April 26, 2004 10:35 PMsorry for the 3 posts, my safari went crazy
Posted by: anna on April 26, 2004 10:36 PMAfter wasting far too much time, reinstalling Panther (using the Archive & Install method) solved the problem. The good news is that like a good Unix, OS X keeps user preferences in your home directory, so reinstalling the OS from scratch doesn't require resetting all your preferences. Unfortunately, reinstalling an operating system is not something that one should have to do-- it seems so, so, Windows-ish.
Posted by: Andrew on May 3, 2004 06:16 PMIt's called an "Archive Install" - and you get to it by going clicking on customize (bottom left) during the install.
Posted by: Ben Johnson on May 3, 2004 06:20 PM