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Half of my applications are gone! Please help!

S

sportsfanMAW

macrumors regular
Original poster
Dec 27, 2006
241
3
Hi all,
So I have a late 2006 MacBook running OS X 10.5.6. Today I noticed that my iCal icon was translucent and there was the "?" on top of it. Confused I clicked on the applications folder in the dock and the grid showed all of the applications on my mac, however it was only about 35 applications. Normally I have the full grid plus 10 or so that are left to see in finder. Now I was worried so I went to the actual applications folder and there was a lot of empty space in between each app, the perfect amount of space for the apps that are now gone. So I clicked on iPhoto and iChat in the dock and both appeared with question mark... And oddly enough I had been using iChat but didn't realized that it disconnect from the internet, so I quit it and tried to restart which is when I got the question mark.

Does anyone know what could possibly be happening?? I'm really at a loss here and am quite nervous. I do have weekly backups of my computer on a Time Machine which makes me feel a bit safer, but I still would like to know what is causing this...

Thanks for any help!
 
Sounds like a strange one. First thing I would do is look in the trash and make sure the apps are not there. If they are, drag them back to the applications folder. I'd also repair permissions and reboot. Good luck.
 
rdowns said:
Sounds like a strange one. First thing I would do is look in the trash and make sure the apps are not there. If they are, drag them back to the applications folder. I'd also repair permissions and reboot. Good luck.
Click to expand...

Well I wasn't thinking and i hit empty trash and it deleted around 800 items which may have been them... But I used Time Machine and recovered all of them (thank God!) However when I click on the user part in the finder window I have all of the normal folder plus a bunch of nearly transparent ones that i have no idea what they are... And on my desktop I have an icon called .DS_Store. Every time I try and delete it it just reappears, any ideas on what this is?

And no I haven't dropped it or done anything strange with it. In fact I had used mail to add a few events to iCal and then was playing a game when I realized that it had disappeared. Strange!
 
ds.store files are always there if you have any icon/file/folder/alias on your desktop. It has something to do with customizations. Normally it is a hidden file, so somehow you have set your computer to "show all files," which is why you are seeing it.
 
jive turkey said:
ds.store files are always there if you have any icon/file/folder/alias on your desktop. It has something to do with customizations. Normally it is a hidden file, so somehow you have set your computer to "show all files," which is why you are seeing it.
Click to expand...

Anyway to change it back?
 
macbookfan said:
http://www.brooksandrus.com/blog/2007/03/23/mac-os-x-show-hide-hidden-files-in-finder/
Click to expand...

I tried that, however the files are still there... any other ideas?

here some screenshots of what it looks like

Picture 1.png Picture 2.png Picture 3.png

EDIT: Also notice that the applications folder only says three files, which is true for that folder, but in my real applications folder there are many.

This is a screenshot of when i click on the harddrive in the finder window. The one above was the user finder window.

Picture 4.png
 
those are DEFINTILY the hidden files that finder normally doesn't show, simply because they are crucial system files and such.

Try going through the process of telling Finder to hide those again, its normal for the computer to show those though, you can easily type in the correct terminal commands telling finder to show those files. All you have to do is, the reverse of that.

Your apps dissapearing is VERY odd though... failing HDD is the best thing i can think of. are you familiar wiht running a hardware test to test your HDD?
 
applefan69 said:
those are DEFINTILY the hidden files that finder normally doesn't show, simply because they are crucial system files and such.

Try going through the process of telling Finder to hide those again, its normal for the computer to show those though, you can easily type in the correct terminal commands telling finder to show those files. All you have to do is, the reverse of that.

Your apps dissapearing is VERY odd though... failing HDD is the best thing i can think of. are you familiar wiht running a hardware test to test your HDD?
Click to expand...

I'm trying the command "defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles False
and
killall Finder

yet it doesn't work...

And I have both disk warrior and Drive Genius 2 so I will run hardware tests from both of those applications and see if anything comes up wrong
 
ok so I have no idea why but I tried that code again and now it worked... Man this is crazy.
 
macbookfan said:
time to do a backup and reinstall. it's just not worth the time to try and figure out whats the matter
Click to expand...

ok I wanna make sure I do this right. So I should back up my HDD with time machine, then insert the Leopard disc and reinstall? Do I do an archive and install or just a fresh install? Also once it's loaded is there a way to get all my stuff back from the TM just as it was? For example all my preferences and bookmarks and playlists in itunes and such? I have a lot of playlist and remaking them would be such a hassle!
 
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