Strangest problem I've seen, at least on a mac!

Hello there! A vierd problem has occured on my mac. This problem would be "normal" on a pc, but on a mac? Never.


I've just made a clean installation on my mac.

It's a dual 2ghz, 3.5 gb ram, OSX 10.4.10

When I started the mac the first time, I saw a square just about the size of the mouse arrow.

Whenever I start something new, like open an extra page in finder. A square around the mouse arrow stays in the new image.

This happens with everything I do.

The best way to explain to show it in pictures.
http://bildr.no/view/94953

As you can see under "Skrivebord" there is a blue square. There is also a grey area on the left side of the picture.

I have no idea about what to do.

The hardware check turned out ok.

I have also deselected the "Show preview rectangle when zoomed out".

PLEASE HELP ME!!!

Welcome to Mac-Forums, dagfather.

Yeesh! Quite frankly I've never seen anything like this and I really don't know what you could do.

It looks like there is an invisible Terminal window layered over the Finder window.

When did this odd thing began? Right after the new install? Why did you reinstall in the first place? Was it related to another problem? And if so, which problem was it?

Did you try creating a new user account to see if you have the same display anomaly?

ABout the terminal window. I have never used Terminal, but if you are referring to the colors? The colors, symbols or text that is "transferred" is whatever is underneath the mouse arrow when I open a new finder window.

The blue square in finder is a part of a symbol of a mac forum in Norway.


This computer is used for video editing and post production.
We had a couple of quiet days at the office and figured we would like to make a clean installation of the new Final Cut studio 2.

There was also a couple of older installations of Final cut, soundtrack, after effects, and such.

There were no problems with the mac before we decided to format the drive and make a clean installation.

Occasionally there were a few bugs with some of the programs, but nothing more than "normal".

I tried yesterday to format the drive and make another installation of OSX. I thought perhaps there could have happened somthing during the installation.


Another wierd problem is that the silver plate that slides up and down in front of the cd/dvd drive doesn't allways go up again after inserting a cd. I just saw that today.

On a pc this would/could have been a hardware problem, but on a mac I have no idea!

any more good ideas?

Another wierd problem is that the silver plate that slides up and down in front of the cd/dvd drive doesn't allways go up again after inserting a cd.

Click to expand...

If you have the G5 tower, the optical drive is either not seated correctly or someone tried to open the tray by pushing that silver plate and bent it in.
As far as the graphic problem, try MacHeadCase's recommendation to make another User account.

Yes try the other user account. If it still does it, to me from the pic is looks like some video problem maybe with the video card, but this is just a guess. I have seen that on a Windows system a few times and at least a few of those times it was something wrong with the video card or driver. Since this is a new install of OSX am not sure.

The CD Drive door issue is probably an alignment issue like Sherman was talking about.

Sherman Homan said:

If you have the G5 tower, the optical drive is either not seated correctly or someone tried to open the tray by pushing that silver plate and bent it in.
As far as the graphic problem, try MacHeadCase's recommendation to make another User account.

Click to expand...

The weird thing is that this started at the same time. At least as far as I know.

The same problem occurs after creating a new user account.

Sorry guys, we're not there yet!


By the way. It works perfectly except from that small, extremely irritating and frustrating square that appears ever other second.

The only thing I can think of is zeroing all the data from that hard drive using DiskUtility before installing the OS all over again. This will deeply reformat the hd. This is happening just with one machine, right?

This is all on one machine.

Do i Need to take the disc out and install it in another machine to format the drive in disc utility?

Or is there a way to format it while it's still in there?

You'll need to boot from the install media and instead of going straight for the install, look in the menubar and choose DiskUtility. Do the deep reformat i.e. zeroing the data. Am at school now so cannot verify the exact terminology, sorry.

Perhaps just get a new drive then? Problably the best way or what?

we ordered a new disc. It will be here in a couple of days.

I hope this works!

Thanks. I'll let you guys know.

NOW I'M GETTING upset!!!!

Bought a new harddrive today. a 500gb Seagate.

Formatted the drive on my other mac, installed OSX and still the same problem.

Then I wondered if there could be something wrong with the installation disc. I once had a XBOX game that didn't work properly, apparently some of the released games had a "burn issue".

I formatted the drive again. And then I installed it with another OSX disc.

But now.... I still get the same squares and all!!!

I guess good advice doesn't come cheap anymore.

Is there any other suggestions, before this machine takes a trip to an apple store?

The only thing I could think of is that maybe something is activated in the Universal Access pane in the System preferences. But... On two different HDs, two different installs?

I would have it checked out if it is still under warranty. After clean installs, weird CD tray closures, I dunno, looks like maybe it needs to be examined properly.

Initially, I thought a simple zeroing of all the data and a reinstall would do magic. Seems like this isn't the case anymore.

Keep us up to date with the outcome of this, I am very curious in knowing what is wrong exactly with your Mac. Good luck!

Hi guys.

WE HAVE FINALLY FIGURED IT OUT!!!!!!

It turned out it was the graphics card.

We ordered a new graphics card, and it took a while.

So we plugged in the all "new" ATI RADEON 9600.
And tere it was again, the same square..

It is the graphics card, the RADEON 9600, that dowsn't work with the newest OSX 10.4.10

We did get to borrow another card for a week and there was no problem what so ever.

We even tried installing the RADEON 9600 in antoher mac justr to see if the squares showed up. And guess what, THEY DID!


So what have we done? Ordered an all new mac pro 3.0 ghz.



I do think that is the option that all people should immediately go for if encountering any kind of similar problems!




Thanks though for all you info and input.

This problem is now solved!


Have a nice week!

Thanks for reporting back the solution! This will help anyone else having the same problem and you just added to my understand of Mac OS X.

Glad it got sorted out dagfather. I was reading this post from top to bottom and was about to suggest either the graphics card or the graphics driver. This is the only thing that could cause this sort of behavior. Glad it is fixed.