Finder & Desktop Frozen - Spinwheel

[SustainedNote]

System:
MacBook Pro 13-Inch UniBody Late '09
Mac OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard - 2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo - 4GB 1067 MHz DDR3
(750GB 2.5" Western Digital 'Scorpio BLACK' 7200RPM SATA 9.5mm Notebook HD with 16MB)

My Finder is frozen and I cannot seem to relaunch it successfully. I have restarted, restarted in Safe Mode, I have killed (force quit) the Finder program, installed updates etc etc to no avail.

I cannot select anything on my desktop and anytime I touch an open Finder, the spinwheel occurs and I cannot perform any system functions (restart etc). I also cannot access Terminal or anything through Spotlight.

I am able to launch all programs and use them smoothly. In fact, I can access files folders on my desktop and drives from Gmail to send. It's just Finder and Spotlight that are frozen (as far as I can tell). When I force quit Finder, the folders reload but are frozen when I try to close them. I backed up time machine yesterday. I wonder if I should revert to an earlier state? Also, I left my music folder off of the time machine backup as it is too large. Will setting back my system delete my music?

I am told that possibly trashing my prefs (com.apple.desktop.plist) will help, but I can't get there without Terminal, spotlight or Finder. Anyone know how I can do this?

Does anyone think this might be my newish (2-3 months) 750GB drive failing?

Any help would be much appreciated.

Brandon

 

[chscag]

I think the first thing to do is to verify that hard drive. Boot your machine with the Snow Leopard DVD and use Disk Utility from the DVD to verify and if necessary repair the hard drive. Let's see what Disk Utility tells us about the hard drive.

Post back the results and we can go from there.

 

[SustainedNote]

I think the first thing to do is to verify that hard drive. Boot your machine with the Snow Leopard DVD and use Disk Utility from the DVD to verify and if necessary repair the hard drive. Let's see what Disk Utility tells us about the hard drive.

Post back the results and we can go from there.

I attempted to Boot from my Snow Leopard disc and my system makes a bunch of drive noises then spits the disc out. I am able to load this disc on other computers.

I am now able to use Spotlight so I can load Disk Utility. I did so and verified that the HD is OK. When I verified permissions I got hundreds of lines of the following:

Permissions differ on "System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jdk/Contents/Classes/dt.jar", should be lrwxr-xr-x , they are lrw-r--r-- .

User differs on "System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jdk/Contents/Home/lib", should be 0, user is 95.

Permissions differ on "System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/A/Resources/Deploy.bundle/Contents/Resources/Java/deploy.jar", should be -rw-r--r-- , they are lrw-r--r-- .

Permissions differ on "System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/A/Resources/Deploy.bundle/Contents/Resources/Java/libdeploy.jnilib", should be -rwxr-xr-x , they are lrwxr-xr-x .

Then just a few of these:

ACL found but not expected on "private/etc/apache2/users".

ACL found but not expected on "Library/Preferences/Audio".

ACL found but not expected on "Library/Preferences/com.apple.alf.plist".

Permissions differ on "System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/RemoteDesktop.menu/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/RemoteDesktopMenu.nib", should be drwxr-xr-x , they are -rwxr-xr-x .


Any ideas?

Would trashing my preferences help?

Thanks,
Brandon