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TICKET ARCHIVE -> Applications Folder Won't Open

NathanZ - Jan 2, 2006 - 8:57 pm

My wife has a Blueberry G3 ibook. System was 10.2.6 . Had some problem with Camino browser. Upon restart had Finder flashing on and off. No files on Desktop. Icons on Dock were generic. Used Disk Utility on OS 10.2.3 CD-ROM to repair permissions. Helped some. Ran it quite a few times. Also ran Disk Repair. Said Disk was OK. Installed OS 10.2.3 but didn't fix problems. Followed advice on Macosx to trash com.apple.dock.plist, com.apple.finder.plist and com.apple.LaunchServices.plist. This gave me new Dock with good icons, but missing non-apple icons. Still can't open Applications folder. Also can't open 10.2.6 upgrade .dmg. When I click on Applications folder, screen goes all blue. Then files on Desktop reappear, but can not be dragged. Can use Mail and Internet Explorer, but Explorer crashes frequently. Have to restart to be able to drag files. Have ordered Diskwarrior, but wonder if there might be something else we could do right now?

ishan - Jan 2, 2006 - 9:57 pm

Yes, there are two things you should do ASAP:

1. Back up your irreplaceable files (documents, movies, scans, photos, etc.) ASAP. You have some major OS corruption and might not be able to boot your internal boot disk much longer.
2. Do an archive/install using the original CDs that came with your wife's iBook. I don't know what version of 10.x that was at this point. Let Software Update update your OS and Apple apps as it feels appropriate. You can then decide to upgrade back up to 10.2.6, 10.3 or 10.4 at your leisure.
3. This is not a problem DiskWarrior will fix...it is a one trick pony (and a superb one) but it only fixes directory damage. You have far more than that going on. Nevertheless, I think your purchase of DW is an excellent idea (I have no affiliation with AlSoft, the manufacturer of DW).

HTH and please let us know what happens. Thanx.

NathanZ - Jan 3, 2006 - 10:49 am

Thanks for the help. We will back up everything we can. The original Software Restore CD is for System 9.0.4. I did do an archive/install of 10.2.3, but problems didn't go away. Third party icons show up as generic. A downloaded pdf file does not have the normal pdf icon. Attempt to open pdf file brings up a box saying application to open it can't be found. So I guess there is a big problem in the Applications folder.
Thanks - Nathan