10.3.9: Finder hangs upon viewing certain folders.

[nagromme]

In 10.3.9 I've now found 3 different folders on my HD that hang the Finder (beachball and massive CPU usage) when viewed. (They will also hang Dock folder menus and app Open/Save dialogs.)

These are folders that were fine before I went from 10.3.7 to 10.3.9.

(Classic apps and the Terminal can view these directories just fine. And I see nothing amiss by those methods. And files within those directories open fine--but I have to get to them using Find.)

Any thoughts on tracking this down? Repair Disk/Repair Permissions don't help. Trying from another user account doesn't help. Two of these folders have just a few items, one has more--but they're vital folders I need to access! (One in Applications, the others are subfolders of my desktop.)

TIA

 

[nagromme]

I'm getting warmer... Disk Repair claimed all was fixed, but actually there was an "overlapped extent allocation." I deleted the offending file (nothing vital), and that message went away. Perhaps that was the original cause of these issues ...

... But they haven't stopped.

New details:

It's a CERTAIN FILE in each folder that causes the hang. Only when I scroll to bring that file into view (any view) does the hang occur.

BUT if I use Column View and turn off Icons, then no hang! That it, not until I click the file and it tries to display the preview pane.

So I turn off Show Preview Column. Now I can select the file without a hang. But I CANNOT open it or do anything with it.

Except: I can drop the whole file into an already-open BBEdit Lite document. The file's contents appear to be fine (an RTF doc in this case).

So somehow the file (and several others) is damaged yet not damaged? What can I do here?

I can restore these files from backup... but how can I KNOW WHICH files are bad? I'd like to ID the problem so I can make sure I don't have dozens of bad files all over. I can't possibly manualy view all my thousands of files to test them. Disk Repair says all is well... but it's not.

TIA

 

[byla]

it seems like I have the same problem, just everywhere I go on the HD it hangs after just scrolling a big in the list view, icon view is fine... goddamnit what is wrong?

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/127453/

Actually the icon view is not fine, it just doesnt hang so soon....

And holly jezus, after deleting Max Payne game folder it started to work fine...

 

[Makosuke]

It could be something else, but it seriously sounds like both of these problems are due to disk problems of some sort--if you've got any overlapped extents, that's bad business there. Either there's something physically wrong with the disk, or you've developed some corruption that is likely to worsen.

If you haven't done this yet, starting in single user mode and doing an fsck -yf is a start (I guess booting from the OS installer disc and running Disk Utility from there on the startup disk is the same thing), but you might also try to get ahold of a 3rd party disk utility and do a more thorough check if you haven't. Were it I, I'd probably go a little more drastic--back up everything, reformat the disk, and reinstall from scratch. That'll clean out any problems.

Incidentally, the finder will hang if you're in collumn view and you select (thereby previewing) a video file that causes Quicktime to hang (this happens with some AVIs in QT7), but that's not what's happening to you.

Good luck.

 

[nagromme]

More details on my situation:

* It's not a disk problem--I've done repairs of every type (including single user mode and deleting the overlapping file). My disk did have one overlapped file, but that's fixed now.

* It's always WORD PROCESSING DOCUMENTS that cause the hang. BOTH docs and rtfs... but here's the odd thing... it's ONLY files that were sent to me through email. Ones sent 5 years ago or ones sent today (which hang Mail itself 🙁 )--but ones I created myself, no matter when, are fine.

* When I copy the files to another drive, it doesn't help.

* BUT when I copy the files to another COMPUTER--or move one of my drives to another computer--the files are fine!

* Therefore I no know the files AND the disk are fine. Thank goodness 🙂 It's something messed up at the OS level of this one machine. Since Tiger's out, I'm going to just do an A&I when I move from Panther to Tiger, and I hope that will solve the issue.

 

[Hubersan]

Hi there!

I had a similar problem - slow Mac, beach-ball of death, finder hangs and all icons apart from the HDD icon on the desktop are invisible, Mac cannot reboot - only via Power-Off, etc. and my remedy was to delete files with quite long filenames (containing also some rare characters like the pipe-char, etc.) from my desktop.
The only way to do this was using Spotlight to find the Terminal. Then run Terminal, check the content of Desktop (ls /Users/my_name/Desktop) and then delete one by one those strange files (they were actually PDFs saved from the web, but I am sure their names caused the problem - no the actual file). To do this I use "rm /Users/my_name/Desktop/filename_A".
Then I restarted Finder and everything was back to normal.

Cheers,
Hubersan

 

[nagromme]

It was so long ago I don't remember what fixed it--probably a software update. I know I didn't have to do an Archive & Install after all.