I used disc first aid in os9 and now jaguar crashes

[julia80]

When I restarted with os9 as startup disc (have to sometimes to pick up certain word files that have been sent to me) there was an error message. I tried to fix it with disc first aid, but suddenly realised that I shouldn't be doing that, so stopped it.

Now my computer crashes whenever I shut down or restart in osx.2 and I have to use the emergency shut down button.

It also crashes if I try to use the disk utility to mend it.

Help!

[yellow]

Try rebooting in single user mode (i.e., reboot and hold down cmd-s). If it makes it to the prompt, then type in /sbin/fsck -y. Let it do it's magic, then type it in again. Once it's done the second time, type sync, then a second time when the prompt comes back. Finally type in reboot. Hope fully this will fix any peculiarities.

Jacques

[julia80]

Thanks, Jacques, I'll have a go right now

[julia80]

Hi

I've done all that and it was really interesting, I did it twice (ie two times twice) and it was doing stuff, modifying things, but there came up on each occasion a whole load of "overlapped extent allocation" notices for about thirty files, all numerically arranged one after the other up to 545983d.

The computer still crashes if I shut down or restart, so I guess that's the problem. Any idea how to fix this?

Thanks

[yellow]

Greetings,

Well, I'm not sure of a good way to try and fix problems with that. Are there any indicators in the system.log (found in /var/logs/) as to why it's crashing? Unless you can find someone on here with specific knowledge about files that are safe to trash, I'd avoid messing about in the System. Sooo, let's see. It only crashes on Shutdown or Restart in 10? Odd.

First thing to try: create a new user, log in as that user, and see if it still crashes on you. This will help point the finger at a System wide problem or just some corruption associated with your user. I suspect that it's going to be System wide.

At this point you might try booting from the Jaguar CD, going to the Installer pull down menu and selecting Open Disk Utility. Once the Disk Utility app opens select the First Aid tab and in the window to the left select the named hard drive that you want to repair. Go ahead and click on the Repair Disk button (that should be selectable now) and let 'er rip! This may or may not fix your problems.

The next step might be reinstalling Jaguar from the CD. This can be accomplished with a minimum of fuss if you do a "clean install" and leave the User data intact (only after you've ruled out corrupted users as the problem).

Hope this helps along the road to recovery!

Jacques

[julia80]

Hi

Thanks, I'll try all that. Could you just explain, please for an osx newbie (although a seasoned old os9'er) how I get to system.log. Do I have to go into single user mode again?

I'll let you know how I got on after the weekend, as I'm off to paris now

Thanks

[yellow]

Nope! No need to go to single user mode!

Well, in /Applications/Utilities/ there is an application called Terminal. Think of it as a window to the underpinnings of OS X. (Beware! Do not fiddle around lightly in here! ) There are tons of commands that can be accomplished via the (a) terminal window. We'll stick to reading the system.log for the time being.

So when you open the Terminal app, you will get the last time you 'logged in', a message welcoming you to Darwin, and the prompt (which should look something like [yourcomputername:~] yourusername%). We're going to use a command called 'more'*, 'more' basically reads text and outputs it through your terminal window one 'page' (the page size being the size of your terminal window.) at a time. This is an over simplification of what it can be used to do, but should suffice. There are other commands that can fulfill this role as well, everyone has their preferences. 'less' [will accomplish the same thing as 'more], and 'cat' [will output everything all at once (not a page at a time)], to name a few. So how do you use 'more'? Using most of the simpler *NIX commands follows a certain pattern when typed in at the prompt:

command arguments filepath-filename

And 'more' is no different. In this case we'll use -d as an argument (commonly called a flag), what this does is tell 'more' that it should prompt the user with information on how to use it at the bottom of the screen. The filepath-filename means that if you just give 'more' a file name, then 'more' assumes that you mean for it to read a file with the given filename (if it exists) in the directory that you are currently in. Now you could navigate your way to the location of the proper file**, or you could just cut out the middle man and enter in the full path to where the file lives and 'more' will read that file in that place for you. In this case, the file we want to read is called system.log. So now when we put it all together, at the prompt type:

more -d /var/log/system.log

Depending on the length of your system.log, you may or may not need to use 'more''s built in paging. For the record, spacebar moves you forward 1 page, b moves you back one page, and q will quit 'more' right where you are.

The info that you see in system.log will be mysterious to the untrained eye, and indeed some of it is mysterious to the eye trained in other flavors of UNIX. A lot of what you see here will become more obvious over time as you view the logs and get comfortable with it and draw correlations between actions, problems, and what you see in the logs.

A good resource for those uninitiated in UNIX of any flavor (and one that I lend to our new IT people) is Learning Unix For Mac OS X, you can find more info at the Apple Store online by (hopefully) following this link: http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPL...27.8.3.11.13.0

It covers man of the basic UNIX commands and will help you get more comfortable with what you see and what you can do 'behind the scenes' of Aqua.

I hope this helps start you out to being an OSXPOwerUser!
Enjoy Paris.

Jacques

*: For more information on 'more', type man more at the prompt. So, 'man' is the command used to get internal manual pages on commands and pieces/parts of the *NIX files system, commands that are associated with the command you are looking up are usually listed at the end of the man page.

** man cd will give you a little info on directory navigation.

[lerkfish]

most likely, the cause of your problems happened if you had norton to automatically repair, and had it to repair filenames containing a period (.)-- this is a common problem with earlier versions of norton that did not recognize the unix flavor of OSX and mistakenly thought these files were corrupted or errors and tried to fix them.

If this WAS the case, your best best is to reinstall OSX over top of your existing, which should fix things.