System Preferences>Preferences Error

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Hi

My first post! :)

Just looking at System Preferences and tried to check the General Preferences and am getting a drop down error message:

"Preference Error - Could not load General preferences pane"

All the other preferences open ok.

Can anyone tell me how to resolve this?

*edit*

This is running on a Macbook Pro and Lion

Thank you
 

chscag

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Welcome to the Mac Forums.

That's a strange error. Usually, if the System Preferences application is corrupt or missing, none of the preferences will be available.

Try this: Reboot your machine and see if you can access the General preference pane. If not, do this... reboot and hold down your option key. Select the Recovery Partition to boot from. After the machine boots to Recovery, select Disk Utility. From the Disk Utility dialog box, select "Repair Permissions". It may take awhile to finish. Reboot back to normal mode. And don't worry about the permission statements from the system.
 
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Welcome to the Mac Forums.

That's a strange error. Usually, if the System Preferences application is corrupt or missing, none of the preferences will be available.

Try this: Reboot your machine and see if you can access the General preference pane. If not, do this... reboot and hold down your option key. Select the Recovery Partition to boot from. After the machine boots to Recovery, select Disk Utility. From the Disk Utility dialog box, select "Repair Permissions". It may take awhile to finish. Reboot back to normal mode. And don't worry about the permission statements from the system.

Thank you for your response, I have tried what you suggested but am still getting the same error message.

Any other suggestions?
 

vansmith

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According to this, some library/ies might be missing. Don't worry about the convoluted solution posted there just yet. Let's test to see if this is the case.

Open up Console (/Applications/Utilities), set it to "All Messages" and the try to open up SYstem Preferences. Do you see any new error messages added to the Console log? If so, can you post them here?
 
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This is what is contained in the system log when opening the general preferences :


23/01/2012 20:11:34.853 System Preferences: com.apple.preference.general failed to load.
-[__NSCFString _getValue:forType:]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x400410600
 
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Did you make a USB Thumb Drive copy of Lion or is Recovery available when you hold Option on startup? You may need to run the Installer. Your current Lion version will go back to OS X.7 and you will need to update from there. Applications etc will not be affected as you do not need to format the hard drive..
 
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If I remember correctly the Recovery is available when option was held at startup.

This is a new macbook pro and came with 10.7.2 installed, that still mean I will need to update?

How long does an installation take?
 

vansmith

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Hmmm, that doesn't help much unfortunately. Thanks for posting it though.

This is a bit mind boggling. I don't have a com.apple.preference.general plist (or anything called com.apple.preference.general). Do you have a file called "Appearance.prefPane" in Macintosh HD > System > Library > PreferencePanes?

(Despite being called "Appearance", it's the General pref pane).
 
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Hmmm, that doesn't help much unfortunately. Thanks for posting it though.

This is a bit mind boggling. I don't have a com.apple.preference.general plist (or anything called com.apple.preference.general). Do you have a file called "Appearance.prefPane" in Macintosh HD > System > Library > PreferencePanes?

(Despite being called "Appearance", it's the General pref pane).

Yes I do
 

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Double click on it. That should, if it's missing, re-add it. I'm not sure if this will work but the original error seems to imply that it might be missing from System Preferences.
 
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Double clicking just brings back the same message.

I just tried deleting the Preference Pane and then restoring one from my first time machine backup but I still get the same error. I'm pretty sure the General Preferences were working when I first got the macbook pro.

Maybe a reinstall of the os as suggested earlier is the only solution?
 
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Have you solved that problem?

Hi

My first post! :)

Just looking at System Preferences and tried to check the General Preferences and am getting a drop down error message:

"Preference Error - Could not load General preferences pane"

All the other preferences open ok.

Can anyone tell me how to resolve this?

*edit*

This is running on a Macbook Pro and Lion

Thank you

Have you solved that problem?
 

pigoo3

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Have you solved that problem?

You just asked someone a question from 4.5 years ago. And they haven't visited Mac-Forums in 4 years.;)

- Nick
 

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