Icons and Dock suddenly vanished...

[eaglefund]

I've just recently upgraded to Panther (running 10.3.4) on a G4 500 Desktop. Things were working fine for the first 24 hours, and then mysteriously as I began to click different icons, they would disappear, until all 3 drives of the partitioned hard drives vanished. There was nothing left on the screen except the cursor.

I restarted several times, and it would boot up normally, ask me to login (it didn't have my user name pre-filled though), and once I logged in, I would again be taken to this empty screen. It's not a solid blue, just one of the default screen patterns. No dock, no icons, just the cursor.

I was concerned that my hard drive was dying, so I booted off the OS9 disk, and that works fine. All the drives are still there along with the data.
Anyone experienced anything like this before? I tried a few of the suggestions on the Apple site but those didn't help at all.

I'm thinking now that my best bet is to reinstall Panther, but I don't want to erase all the set-up I've already done (address books, Calendar, etc.). If I install with the "Archive and Install" option, will that protect what I've done?
thanks!

 

[RiseAgainst]

For some reason your Finder keeps restarting. Assuming that you have not already, try this:

Repair permissions then restart while holding Command - S. At the screen type "fsck -fy".

If this does not fix if I would just do a Clean install of OSX to make sure the problem is gone.

 

[rainman::|:|]

For some reason your Finder keeps restarting. Assuming that you have not already, try this:

Repair permissions then restart while holding Command - S. At the screen type "fsck -fy".

If this does not fix if I would just do a Clean install of OSX to make sure the problem is gone.

I'm not sure he can repair permissions without being able to get to Disk Utility... which it doesn't sound like he can do.

Are there any other accounts on the machine? Did you enable Root? Logging in as another user or Root, then repairing permissions, will probably take care of this...

paul

 

[wrldwzrd89]

I'm not sure he can repair permissions without being able to get to Disk Utility... which it doesn't sound like he can do.

Are there any other accounts on the machine? Did you enable Root? Logging in as another user or Root, then repairing permissions, will probably take care of this...

paul

Hey paulwhannel - that's not entirely true. You can repair permissions from the command line:

/usr/sbin/diskutil repairPermissions /

Edit: Yeah! 68000 status, finally!