Big Problems - No Restore Disk

I ran into a few problems running final cut on my power mac g4 MDD and long story short a friend opened the console for me and pasted a few commands in from some post online, and long story short it worked. That is, until i turned it on the next day and now I cannot open any applications at all. Some open but never show a windows, others bounce for a few seconds then stop. Also on the finder bar, items like time and airport status and the volume icon have disappeared. I cannot get any windows open except for finder. Not even the log out, restart, and shut down dialogs work. I have to do a hard reset just to get the mac to switch off. Safe mode gets it stuck on the apple loading screen with the apple logo and the spinning wheel you get when you load the OS. I dont know what it was he did exactly but he said it was some graphics thing that was causing problems. He mentioned quartz something and something else. When I inquired him about it, he said he just pasted some terminal commands and didn't really know what they did. Anyone want to help? I have no restore disks and I'm not going to be able to pay the $185 price tag for them on eBay.

I do have access to the machine through Mac OS 9.2 and a panther startup disk I pulled from an old imac, but panther has no support for any of my programs I need, and there are no current browsers either, so installing that would be impractical to use.

Basically I need to figure out what he did and undo it, and NEVER let my friend touch my computer again.

And the Panther iMac disc will not install either alas. Only suggestion is purchasing Tiger/Leopard full retail install DVD and doing a clean install, assuming of course you do not have an external drive and the system cloned via SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner. It is pretty risky running an operating system with no install discs at any time as it is the best trouble shooting utility available. How did you get the operating system on? Borrowed discs and illegally I guess?

When you do get it up keep that friend well and truly away from your Mac. In the meantime use OS 9.

First, smack your "friend" for using terminal copypasta without having a clue what he did. It actually sounds identical to what happens if the symlinks for /var /usr and /bin that live, hidden in on your hard disk get removed.

If this is in fact what happened, it's not too hard to fix, but somehow I actually doubt it since the system will start at all.

harryb2448 said:

How did you get the operating system on? Borrowed discs and illegally I guess?

When you do get it up keep that friend well and truly away from your Mac. In the meantime use OS 9.

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I purchased the mac secondhand and it did not come with an OS disk. Look at my first posts here if you don't believe me. I do not pirate software. In fact, you even commented a few times on my posts when I was running through my options I believe. And your right, the install disk I pulled will not let me install the panther os, it wants to wipe the HD first, which is not an option yet since I haven't exhausted everything and I have important files I need.

I've emailed a few people asking if they own mac with the install disk I could borrow. In the meantime, anyone have ideas to at least get it in a semi-working state?

Is there a console-only mode, sort of like DOS, that would allow me to launch programs and change settings without the GUI, seeing as this is a software issue related to the graphics?

If it came with the OS without the disc it was on there illegally. Nothing changed. You do need install discs to format the drive and do a clean install.

Ok I cannot argue with your logic there, however I am not responsible for the legality of the os. The previous owner said that he got it from another owner who had lost the discs. Maybe I should have been a bit more cautious when buying my mac, but I figured since I can't find my xp discs either that's a common problem. If you want to get into legal issues technically this isn't my mac since it was not purchased or registered by me, yet thousands, if not hundreds od thousands of people own used macs as well. My point is that I did not illegaly install an operating system onto this mac. I always pay for my software when it costs money, I even shelled out over $150 for the windows 7 upgrade. After microsofts total vista failure you'd think they would release 7 as a free upgrade as apple did with 10.1

Anyway, if we are done talking about that, I actually did find a solution. I figured since the system was only semi-useable I would try and fix it via the finder which was the only working part of the system. After doing some research into how system settings were stored, I located all the preference files in the library, moved them to a temporary folder, found those same directories on the old iMac running panther (the same one I had the panther disc with) and copied those to a flash drive, and then to the directory in leopard while running in os 9.2, restarted and viola! It worked. I will still try to obtain a leopard disk as I have wanted to for a while now, but $185 doesn't come as easily as it used to. I'm actually very surprised this worked, especially considering the difference in os versions but it did. And I talked to my friend, he said the same codes he put in my mac he put in his mac, but I guess the codes were meant for either intel or 64bit processors, not the g4. But then again I am only speculating.

Good work.

Keep an eye on the trading ads here on the forums as Leopard does come up from time to time. Tiger OS X.4 is still reasonably expensive also alas. When you do purchase Leopard make sure you do get the full retail install DVD, which is a black coloured disc and not a silver grey model specific version, like the iMac Panther discs.

They abound on eBay and such under names like Drop In DVD, restore, system, update etc etc.

get a new disc

If its the disc thats the issue call into apple care as long as you are the registered owner of the computer they can send you out a replacement its goin to cost you 16$ buts alot cheaper that buying new plus it is legit

As far as calling apple goes, I don't think they will have the disc's you need. They would have to have the original install discs on hand for a computer that is eight years old and I don't think they do. I'll stand corrected if they do.

Either way, it would be the original discs that shipped with that computer containing 10.2. Not a viable option in my opinion. And I doubt they would have these.

You should certainly try and find tiger or leopard for cheap if you can. But seems to me, your best bet would be to clone your drive. If you can. This way you can just revert.

And as far as legality goes, there's tons of sites that will sell you a used mac and not include the install disc. Matter of fact, that's how 99% of them operate. You know they just get these machines and install whatever os on all of them using just one disc. No one seems to care. Apple sure doesn't. Your computer is dead to apple and so is every os before Leopard.

So who cares how you get tiger and earlier and what you do with it. You think Microsoft cares what people do with 95,98 and me? As long as you don't bother them, they don't care. Don't call and don't ask for updates.

Regardless of what people on this board think, tiger and everything before it is dead. Get it how you want and use it how you want. Just don't bother apple with it. They don't care. They want you to buy new hardware. It's pretty obvious that's how they make the bulk of their money. The software is there to entice you in to doing so. Why do you think their software is so great, so cheap and has no real install restrictions? Go install and register Windows 7 on two different machines and see how far that gets you. It's the hardware. And Apple is sure that you'll be back to buy more.

My opinion anyway. And good work on fixing your mac yourself. That was certainly some daring ninja moves.

Everybody has one ....opinion that is

dadsgravy said:

As far as calling apple goes, I don't think they will have the disc's you need. They would have to have the original install discs on hand for a computer that is eight years old and I don't think they do. I'll stand corrected if they do.

Either way, it would be the original discs that shipped with that computer containing 10.2. Not a viable option in my opinion. And I doubt they would have these.

My opinion anyway. And good work on fixing your mac yourself. That was certainly some daring ninja moves.

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I wouldn't expect to get any disks out of apple for a machine that was out of warranty six years ago. And I would not want to use 10.2, almost nothing is supported on it anymore, so it would be pointless.

And thanks but I wasn't all that daring. I backed up the files first and I knew what to look for. Also I did have os 9.2 to use if I made it completely unusable so I would at least get back to square one. I would never attempt something like that if I didn't know for sure that it was reversible. Number one rule when it comes to messing with system files, no matter what kind of pc you are trying to fix.