psheldon
08-04-2009, 12:24 AM
A litany that now has me totally bewildered....
About a week ago I went to use the Macbook Pro (OS 10.4.11) i had used just an hour before...and the display was corrupted....pixillated, bits of windows showing but mostly a mess.
It was plugged in to an APC ups. I restarted and screen went back to normal but finder has been acting strangely:
clicking on Finder in dock does not open a finder window....
clicking on dmgs does nothing (have trashed Extensions.kextcache and Extensions.mkext.... plus the diskimages.fsck and restarted many times).
I cannot restart, shut down or log off from apple menu; must hold down power button, shut down and start again.
About this Mac will not open.
Thumbsticks and cameras do not mount. They will show up after restart and I have been able to do some backups.
The small icons in finder file lists -- mostly in Utilities -- are fuzzy or jaggy or blank, sometimes showing halves of different icons.
For a while, firefox and safari were crashing repeatedly. Was able to download 3.5.1 (after many tries, one of the dmgs finally opened) and it has only crashed once in 36 hours.
Tonight I did two downloads. Was finally able to open one after trashing prefs and starting again but the other will not open. In Disk Utility it is visible on the left pane. Clicking on the mount option does nothing. In Get Info, I see that DiskMounter app was modified June 11, 2 minutes before I installed a security update, according to one of the logs.... probably coincidence....
Console logs talk of crashdump... is that when I have to shut down via button? Also, a few days ago I started to hear a faint purring/clocking/whirring which appeared to be all across the machine, not in one corner or another, and, maybe my imagination, the machine seemed hotter than normal.
It is all quiet now and less hot.
Anyway, if I need to reinstall software, can someone tell me exactly how to do it so I don't lose data. Archive and install? Thanks for your patience. I truly feel sophomoric.
About a week ago I went to use the Macbook Pro (OS 10.4.11) i had used just an hour before...and the display was corrupted....pixillated, bits of windows showing but mostly a mess.
It was plugged in to an APC ups. I restarted and screen went back to normal but finder has been acting strangely:
clicking on Finder in dock does not open a finder window....
clicking on dmgs does nothing (have trashed Extensions.kextcache and Extensions.mkext.... plus the diskimages.fsck and restarted many times).
I cannot restart, shut down or log off from apple menu; must hold down power button, shut down and start again.
About this Mac will not open.
Thumbsticks and cameras do not mount. They will show up after restart and I have been able to do some backups.
The small icons in finder file lists -- mostly in Utilities -- are fuzzy or jaggy or blank, sometimes showing halves of different icons.
For a while, firefox and safari were crashing repeatedly. Was able to download 3.5.1 (after many tries, one of the dmgs finally opened) and it has only crashed once in 36 hours.
Tonight I did two downloads. Was finally able to open one after trashing prefs and starting again but the other will not open. In Disk Utility it is visible on the left pane. Clicking on the mount option does nothing. In Get Info, I see that DiskMounter app was modified June 11, 2 minutes before I installed a security update, according to one of the logs.... probably coincidence....
Console logs talk of crashdump... is that when I have to shut down via button? Also, a few days ago I started to hear a faint purring/clocking/whirring which appeared to be all across the machine, not in one corner or another, and, maybe my imagination, the machine seemed hotter than normal.
It is all quiet now and less hot.
Anyway, if I need to reinstall software, can someone tell me exactly how to do it so I don't lose data. Archive and install? Thanks for your patience. I truly feel sophomoric.