Onyx
ok, yesterday i noticed my powermac G5 was starting to run a bit sluggish. just playing music from itunes it was taking a bit longer then usual to play a track. after leaving my computer running for a few hours, i was prompted by the OS to tell me that i was running out of hard drive space. i originally only had about 1.3GB free on my primary drive. it was now telling me that there was only 240MB left. so i closed itunes and other apps (Word, Safari) and restarted the machine. when it booted back up and i logged in, the dock loaded up fine, but all my desktop icons were missing. also the top bar on the screen was missing, except for just the time part. i have restarted the machine twice after and it still loads up the same.....any ideas? was thinking maybe if i get my hands on a firewire cable i could repair the harddrive in the G5 using DiskWarrior via target mode..is that possible?
After exhausting what seemed like every avenue for the same issue (missing desktop icons, inactive desktop - unable to right-click desktop to bring up options) including a very knowledgeable in-law AND . . . oh, oh . . .
EVEN Apple Tier Two (an expert!, supposedly) I found the application below. Wish I could take credit but it was posted by a very knowledgeable user who apparently
KNOWS what she is doing when it comes to Apples:
Apple - Downloads - System/Disk Utilities - OnyX
This is a
very powerful tool providing a lot of options. It did exactly what she (aforementioned user) said it would, and
THEN some. There were so many options that, rather than taking a great deal of valuable time to familiarize myself with another application, after "
Verifying" our Disk, I selected the "
Automation" tab as well as .DS_Store (or "
Display of Folders Content") under the "
Rebuild" options.
Voila! Desktop returned and system actually seems to run a tiny bit faster (hard to tell, really, since it wasn't running that slow before, but it
DOES seem faster).
Normally I do not like recommending something that I have not used frequently, but this is definitely and
OUTSTANDING tool! Spread the word - seems others are having the same issue on 10.5+ (missing, unrecoverable desktop icons and unresponsive icons, for no evident reason).
After all this (again, trying everything I could think of on my own, local expertise, forums,
Apple!, etc) it is a relief to get this system back to normal.