B
Blue Straggler
Guest
Hi all. Sorry if this has been covered before - I did do a search and failed to find any relevant messages.
I have an iMac G4 800Hz (yes, old and slow, a bit like me, but I've never felt the need to upgrade the hardware yet! It's running Tiger though), it dates back to about 2001
I had a power cut recently and upon restoration of power, at first the iMac was really struggling just to boot up. After a few tries, it seemed to be back to normal...except all the shortcuts and icons (even the Mac Hard Drive one) off my messy desktop had disappeared, leaving only the background image and the dock. Further to this, almost all the applications on the dock won't open, you click the icon and they "bounce" quite optimistically about 3 times then settle down; nothing happens. I can't even open the Finder. All that seems to work is Text Editor, the terminal window/command shell thing, Dashboard, and Safari (which is not my default browser!). Via the command shell I've been able to ascertain that nothing's been zapped from the hard drive. Oh, the Preferences work, I tested this by changing the background image!
I've tried rebooting in Safe Start mode (holding X whilst restarting) but this made no difference.
A similar thing happened a couple of years ago when a scanner died whilst attached to the Mac, and tried to take the Mac down with it. That time I rebooted from the start discs but it was a little unnerving as, at one point, it seemed like the DEFAULT option was to format the hard drive - I was lucky that I was properly alert that day! So I am loth to do this again if there's another way round. Starting in OS 9 then switching to OS X rings a bit of a bell.
It has a 60Gb hard drive which is very full and in need of cleaning up, and 512Mb RAM.
This is only the second time it's PROPERLY crashed.
I only really use MS Office applications (sorry!), Photoshop, iTunes, MatLab and Firefox.
Any hints appreciated, and sorry for the long post.
I have an iMac G4 800Hz (yes, old and slow, a bit like me, but I've never felt the need to upgrade the hardware yet! It's running Tiger though), it dates back to about 2001
I had a power cut recently and upon restoration of power, at first the iMac was really struggling just to boot up. After a few tries, it seemed to be back to normal...except all the shortcuts and icons (even the Mac Hard Drive one) off my messy desktop had disappeared, leaving only the background image and the dock. Further to this, almost all the applications on the dock won't open, you click the icon and they "bounce" quite optimistically about 3 times then settle down; nothing happens. I can't even open the Finder. All that seems to work is Text Editor, the terminal window/command shell thing, Dashboard, and Safari (which is not my default browser!). Via the command shell I've been able to ascertain that nothing's been zapped from the hard drive. Oh, the Preferences work, I tested this by changing the background image!
I've tried rebooting in Safe Start mode (holding X whilst restarting) but this made no difference.
A similar thing happened a couple of years ago when a scanner died whilst attached to the Mac, and tried to take the Mac down with it. That time I rebooted from the start discs but it was a little unnerving as, at one point, it seemed like the DEFAULT option was to format the hard drive - I was lucky that I was properly alert that day! So I am loth to do this again if there's another way round. Starting in OS 9 then switching to OS X rings a bit of a bell.
It has a 60Gb hard drive which is very full and in need of cleaning up, and 512Mb RAM.
This is only the second time it's PROPERLY crashed.
I only really use MS Office applications (sorry!), Photoshop, iTunes, MatLab and Firefox.
Any hints appreciated, and sorry for the long post.
