Did I delete something important?? :-/

[oatcake]

A few days ago I decided to delete a bunch of unused programs to free up some HD space, and now Im concerned that I got rid of something important by accident. It keeps freezing, giving me the beachball, earlier today all of my running programs besides skype crashed simultaneously, then it froze. Finder disappeared. I turn it off in the back, and when it came back on it was stuck on the grey screen. After turning it on and off another few times, it finally, slowly, made its way to the regular desktop. However, my dock was missing things that were usually in it, and had others that shouldnt have been there. Someone told me to restart it and do the fsck (?) thing. I did that twice, and both times it said that the configd.pid, the syslog.pid and the utmpx should have been 1 but were instead 0. Am I missing something that is making it mess up like this? And if so, how can I get them back? I also just reset the PRAM and NVRAM ( I have no clue what this means, husband told me to try it), so dont know if that has fixed the problem. I sort of just keep waiting for it to freeze again.

Oh, and it also sounds like there is a cd running in there, but there isnt any cd. Am I ****ed?

 

[stridemat]

Have you tried booting off the OS X disks and Repairing the HDD?

 

[oatcake]

I just went there and since repair disk wasnt available, clicked on verify disk. This is the answer I got:

Verifying volume “HD”

Performing live verification.
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Invalid sibling link
The volume HD needs to be repaired.

Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed.


Im not sure if I have the original disks that came with the computer :-(

 

[old-wiz]

Deleting "unused" programs and files in OSx or *NIX or running amok changing permissions is not something you should be doing if you don't know what you are doing.

 

[oatcake]

I really didnt think I was deleting anything important, if I did, Im really not sure how that happened. I only deleted photos, applications I dont use and never will (garage band, etc), thats it. Anything I dont recognise, I dont touch. As for changing permissions, I have no idea how I would even do that, so I highly doubt I did it by accident. Thank you for your concern, however it wasnt terribly helpful in this instance.

 

[xlii]

This is what you need to try. Put the system disk (Snow Leopard OSX) in the disk drive. Let it spin up. Now shut the machine down. Now turn the machine on and at the same time hold down the option key on the keyboard. Keep holding the option key down until you see on the screen the option to boot from the internal disk or the cd that is in the cd drive. Select the cd drive to boot from. It will take longer to boot... when it boots up do not reinstall the OS. Select the utility folder and start disk utility. Now you should be able to select repair the internal disk drive instead of just verifying it. This is from memory so if I got one of the steps wrong just do a little digging... good luck.

 

[stridemat]

This is what you need to try. Put the system disk (Snow Leopard OSX) in the disk drive. Let it spin up. Now shut the machine down. Now turn the machine on and at the same time hold down the option key on the keyboard. Keep holding the option key down until you see on the screen the option to boot from the internal disk or the cd that is in the cd drive. Select the cd drive to boot from. It will take longer to boot... when it boots up do not reinstall the OS. Select the utility folder and start disk utility. Now you should be able to select repair the internal disk drive instead of just verifying it. This is from memory so if I got one of the steps wrong just do a little digging... good luck.

That's what I was trying to get the OP to do.

 

[xlii]

That's what I was trying to get the OP to do.

I know... I figured they didn't understand what you meant so I made it a little clearer. I wonder if she got her problem fixed... I guess we'll never know. I was going to suggest... after fixing the disk errors... do an archive and install if she still has the same problem. She should also buy and use a backup disk.