Help please my Mac is sick :o(

Hi all,

Apologies if I have posted this in the wrong area, I am new to this forum.

I have a problem with my Mac, its a G5 (Power PC) and until December I was running Tiger and been faithful until the memory started to slow down due to too many photos in iphoto. So I bought a copy of Leopard and installed and all was fine and am now running OS X 10.5.8. I also purchased a Lacie external hard drive and have downloaded / copied all important info over to the hard drive. I have since loading Leopard successfully backed up using time machine on various occassions.

My problems started a week ago when the computer was turned on and I couldn't see any of the items stored on my desktop, they have completely disappeared. This included my Macintosh HD icon and photos / docs etc, the top tool bar is flashing with what seems to be finder locked open.

So I am now completely stumped as to how to resolve this and if the problem is terminal. I can't download anything to check and there is physically no way for me to access finder as it won't let me click on it whilst flashing. I have run Disk Utility and repaired all the stated problems hoping this would cure it but unfortunately it hasn't.

Any help or suggestions as to what to do and where to start would be awesome.

Thanks in advance
Rich

G'day and welcome to the forums.

When you say you have run Disk Utility, did you do this by booting from the system install disc and running Repair Disk from there? Next question is the hard drive too full as it requires some 15% to work at anywhere near peak efficiency?

harryb2448 said:

G'day and welcome to the forums.

When you say you have run Disk Utility, did you do this by booting from the system install disc and running Repair Disk from there? Next question is the hard drive too full as it requires some 15% to work at anywhere near peak efficiency?

Click to expand...

When I ran the DIsk Utility it wasn't run from the disk, would this make a difference? There is a possibility that the hard drive is fairly full, this was my reason in buying the Lacie external and moving files / photos etc.

Firstly how and what should I be deleting to free up memory space?
Secondly how can I complete a Disk Utility repair from the Install disk. If i load the Leopard Install disk the drive seems to recognise the disk but I can't access anything to prompt the Mac to complete a new install or a completely new Disk Utility.

I feel like its kinda like a revolving problem, I suppose it needs lateral thinking and some advice as to what to do first.

Over to you again

Well, first of move those photos over to the external hard drive. If you are using even a semi-decent camera, you'll notice that photos start to creep through the gigs.

You can boot to the CD by holding down C while you start the computer. Within there, you should find Disk Utility in the top bar.