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TICKET ARCHIVE -> Crash, Reinstall 10.3, Update to 10.3.9, Nothing Working As It Should!!

lenbob - May 20, 2005 - 3:24 am

Hi there,

I have a G4 Dual process (silver door model) 1.8ghz (don't know exactly cos system profiler keeps crashing) 80Gb HD, 2Gb RAM.
Attached, usb hub, 250Gb external firewire hd, various other....

Was running 10.3.8 just fine but ran out of space one day and had a major crash. Resinstalled 10.3.1 and updated to 10.3.9.
Now everything is stalling, crashing, I can't empty trash, Aple apps like System profiler, and disk utility crash on opening.

Please help!!!

Cheers

Lenny

DeltaMac - May 20, 2005 - 7:01 pm

As you can see, OS X does not like to run out of disk space. I have not experienced this, but have read reports of unrecoverable directory corruption when the boot drive is left too full.
Step one, is the make sure you leave space on your boot drive. If that's the 80GB, I usually recommend 10% free space. That would be no less than 8 GB free. There's not any hard and fast rules here (unless you want to tempt fate by going below 250 MB - you'll get warning from the system by then)
Some people recommend 25%, but that seems like more than needed by the size of your drive.
After getting some space, be sure to repair permissions. I would re-load the 10.3.9 Combined Updater (download it if you don't have it) from here: http://www.apple.com/support/downloa...pdate1039.html
Then, repair permissions again after that. Download and use one of the cache maintenance utilities. like OnyX, or YASU, or Maintain, or Cocktail, or MacJanitor. Something that will clean out your cache folders easily.
If you are not working better now, try moving your Preferences folder, from your home/Library folder, to your desktop, then log out and log back in as the same user. Try some of your problem apps. If things are greatly improved, then you have some damaged prefs. You can then try moving some of the prefs back if you really need to. Or, if you are working much better, that Preferences folder on your desktop can just be trashed.
Come back with how it goes

- Dale

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lenbob - May 21, 2005 - 9:25 pm

Hi Dale

Thanks for that. I tried repairing permissions and disk, but it kept coming up with needs repair again. I got to the stage where I couldn't empty trash (error code -1) and need this computer tomorrow (I was down to 74mb space left - oops!). SO! I copied everything (hopefully) to my 250gb external drive (I didn't know how to make a disk image of my hd onto the external hd so I just copied everything I thought I would need).
I wiped the disk, wrote zeros and am in the process of reinstalling os x and all my apps again. Wow its nice to have 74 Gb free space to fill up again! Thanks for your help.

Cheers