[Macpartners] OS X Finder hanging proble

[Janet Littell]

An unfortunate series of machine degradations combined with a less 
than brilliant series of choices on my part has led to the machine 
now hanging on startup, at the gray apple screen. On Tuesday, I'll 
take it in to PC Services and see if anything can be salvaged.

This is how it went:
1. Previous choice: I received expert advice to run fsck -f as opposed to
     fsck -y.  FWIW, I later ran Repair Disk from Disk Utility, and
      no problems were reported.

2. I had created several new users, but the machine hung after logon in
     each case.

3.  Yesterday, I caused the machine to crash to verify that the chugging
      sound was coming from the hard drive, which it is. This time
      when I restarted, the machine hung after I logged on to my Admin account.
      Several restarts didn't help.

3. I tried to boot from Disk Warrior but that didn't work. I didn't
    try to actually install Disk Warrior.

4. I booted from the 10.3 install disk 1 and started a reinstall of 10.3
     using Archive and Install. It aborted about 1/3 of the way through.
     I don't know what messages appeared; I had left the room.

5. I tried the reinstall again. This time I was offered the Easy
     Install option. (I assume this meant that the installer no longer
     detected a 10.3 System folder. Bad sign) I (wrongly?) decided that
     I had nothing to lose so tried to continue the installation. This
     time the installer message was that it could not install on this
     machine. The result is the gray Apple screen on startup.

Based on this sequence of problems, does it sound like there is any 
hope for this machine, especially its data? The Disk Warrior 
documentation
promises to restore data from problem machines but maybe mine is too
far gone.

Thanks,
Janet


>Now, as to the *problem*....
>
>Janet...did you run fsck -fy, or just fsck -f? The difference is important.
>
>Second...did you actually run diskwarrior on this machine by booting from a
>CD? An aborted install can cause a lot of disk structure problems.
>
>The fact that it happens with new users indicates it's completely out of the
>/Users realm.
>
>I would run a current version of Diskwarrior (at least 3.0, most current is
>3.0.2) on the drive, from the DW CD and see if that does the trick.
>
>john
>
>--
>Socks should match your pants, and your belt should match your shoes. After
>that, if anyone complains, tell 'em they should be happy you're wearing any
>clothes at all.
>
>
>
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