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Frozen out of OS X

V

vaquus

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 17, 2010
3
0
My girlfriend has a MacBook Pro and it has worked great, until today.

The Mac OS X on the system has suddenly frozen her out of everything but the finder and the desktop.
It boots fine and pops up on the desktop, and everything looks completely normal.

But when you want to run an application and click on it, a big fat question mark appears over the icon in the bottom menu, no matter what application you click on. Further more it appears that all applications has been wiped from the system when you enter the applications folder. It is completely empty.

Now I've tried to click on different stuff, such as the internet, to turn it off, but nothing happens. I've also tried to enter the OSX preferences, but nothing happens when I do.

At times it comes up with the message that you don't have permission to open certain programs, even though the programs apparently dont exist on the Mac.


I've interrogated my girlfriend about her activity, and she swears she has done nothing out of the ordinary like download shady software or anything, and apparently all of this has come like lightning from a clear sky.


I hope somebody can help us out, cause I'm at my wits end about what to do.
 
Have you got the OS X install disc to which you can boot from and check the disk for incorrect permissions?
 
Put the disc into the computer, reboot and hold down the C key which will tell the computer to boot from the disc.

After it has booted from the disc, you'll be at the installation welcome screen. At the top of the screen, you'll see the menu bar. Click on Utilities and then Disk Utility.

Once Disk Utility has started, select the hard drive from the left sidebar, click on the First Aid tab from the centre screen and then cilck Repair Disk Permissions from the bottom left.

You might also want to try Verify Disk of that same screen to check that the hard drive hasn't gone bad.

Out of curiousity, are you running Leopard or Snow Leopard?
 
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