"Virus?"

I have a powerbook G4 w/Panther 10.3.9 and recently everything has been screwing up. Keychain has erased itself, programs quit, itunes always has to load the library but when closed and opened it says damaged library and has to reload. Files in folders group up and my preferences all reset, things on the dock also disappear all the time. I don't know what to do and my virus scans are coming up with nothing.

What should I do?

Wow, I honestly would just reinstall Panther. That's really out of control to come up with a solution for that. But I don't think that a virus is your problem. But wait around, if someone thinks that they have the solution for you.

wow, best best bet is to do a Erase and Install to fix all your problems. but then you have to back up your stuff

I would try a permissions repair first, then try running an app like MacJanitor or the like. You can also try booting up from the restore CD and running a Disk Repair. It is best to start with simple things first, and then work your way up to more involved troubleshooting techniques. If you have a Hardware Test CD, you may want to try running that as well.
A reinstall should always be your last resort, in my opinion.

What exactly are you doing when things go haywire?
Had you recently installed any new apps?
Had you done any recent updates (hardware, software)?

I doubt it is a virus. Even if it is a virus, since there are no known viruses for Mac a virus scan would not catch it. You can't scan for something no one knows about now can you?

Did you rename your home folder by any chance? Your symptoms are somewhat indicative of this. Renaming home folders, especially the main admin account, is bad. Crossing the streams bad, unless you know what you are doing.

If not what have you done recently and what have you installed? How full is your hard drive? And finally how old is your Mac?

EDIT: And what anti-virus software are you using. AV software seems to have a bad rap around here but I think it is a specific version. (I can't remember which, sorry. NAV maybe?)

Virus

I haven't installed much, some games and songs from an ipod. What is macjanitor and how do I do a restore.


I use virex, that came with my .macm and my computer is about three months old

racerboydrew said:

I haven't installed much, some games and songs from an ipod. What is macjanitor and how do I do a restore.

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MacJanitor is an app that runs the regular maintenance scripts. If you leave your Mac on 24x7, your Mac will run these anyway. It still wouldn't hurt to try it.

DevilBoy can hopefully help you more on the restore than I can.

You might check the logs using console and see if anything sticks out. In particular the console and system logs.

While I reiterate that it is very unlikely to be a virus, your system seems to be in a very bad way right now. You might create a separate admin account and see if that one is stable while you work on what the problem is.

How do I check the logs?

Again just to confirm. Did you rename your home directory? The reason I ask this is it can be fixed but everything seems to point to the permissions in your home directory as being incorrect. It is not the only possibility, but it is the one that comes foremost in my mind.

As an example if iTunes can't save, the DB will be damaged, if Dock can't save its state it will revert, keychain would not be where OS X expects it.

We can try checking the permissions but if the home folder got moved we will have to handle it differently. If permissions are not it then I don't have any ideas at the moment sorry.

racerboydrew said:

How do I check the logs?

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The program called "Console" in your Applications folder, Utilities subdirectory.

I never rnamed my home folder

If you need to eventually restore the OS, all you will really need to do is put in your restore CDs. You will be given an option to erase and install. Just be sure to back up any important data before you do this, as you will lose everything once you commit to the erase and install.
This will bring the PowerBook back to the same condition it was when you first got it. You will have to go through the updates to get it back to 10.3.9.
It is a pretty simple and straightforward process, but because you are going to have to back things up, I usually recommend leaving this as the final option.

As a sanity check can you open a terminal and type "ls -l ~"? There should be 2 columns of names. All of them should be your login name. If they are not let us know. If they are every entry should start with "-rwx" for files and "drwx" for directories.

If all that is the case, go back to checking the logs. If you can't find anything then try a restore, I am not sure how to do it myself though. If that fails I am not sure, wipe an reinstall I guess, but this should not be necessary./ Hopefully someone will have a better idea.

EDIT: Ah, I see. Restore == Reinstall. Yes let's leave that as a last resort.

If the system is indeed this screwed up after simple things like permissions repair, etc....and still after checking the logs, I would recommend a full erase and install. The Archive and install option will likely keep the offending item (whatever it may be) and the process may repeat itself. Wiping and erasing the drive first, then installing would be best in my opinion for this case, but only after more troubleshooting.

I'd just back all your important things up, and reformat.

same exact thing happened to me....i just rebuilt everything and thenit has worked fine. but i have been having an obnormal amount of kernal panics......

I had the same problem about 3 weeks ago and it is funny that the same thing happened to you. What I did was rename the admin and home folder and every time I logged out, I would lose all my files. But thankfully they were in a folder in my hardrive and they were fine. It just took a while. But in your case, if all your files are backed up, just reinstall OS X.