Many error messages...

[cluelessonamac]

I have so many error messages I don't even know where to begin. But, I am hoping that someone out there can help me fix my computer...I need it for school and don't have any money to have a professional look at it. First of all, slowly but surely many of my apps like Photobooth, TextEdit, Automator, Calculator, Font Book, ISync have disappeared. They all have an icon that has been whited out with a circle and a line thru. Most importantly Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint cannot be opened; I receive the following error message, "The application Microsoft Word quit unexpectedly."

I also have been trying to download Office from the microsoft website, but cannot download either...

The iMac is only 3 years old, I have the original disks, but they have been scratched and cannot be read...somebody please give me some ideas.

 

[Macman45]

Okay

You are well on the way to pooching it but let's try a couple of things first.

Can you get to the disk utility? (applications / utilities / disk utilities.

Open it, highlight your iMacs hard drive ( macintosh hdd) then click " verify disk"

If that runs through ok, go back into disk utility, and click " verify permissions" let this finish, then click " repair permissions"

Then post back

 

[cluelessonamac]

Oh boy...

The Disk Utility has an error message as well..."You can't open the application "Disk Utility.app" because it is not supported on this architecture."

Is this really, really bad...

I am so nervous because I allowed my nephews to work on this computer so there is no telling what they have done...

 

[robbieduncan]

I am so nervous because I allowed my nephews to work on this computer so there is no telling what they have done...

I think you will need to find this out. The symptoms you are describing are commonly caused by people who do not understand what they are doing using tools like Monlingual to strip out one or more architectures from the executables to save disk space. This operation cannot be undone and if done incorrectly can leave the applications unrunable (if, for example, they strip the PPC binary on a PPC machine). The only solution in many of these cases is a complete re-install

 

[Taz Mangus]

I would suggest that you try resetting PRAM and see if that helps. If your install disks are scratched, you can request a new set from Apple. If all else fails you may need to do a clean install again. Hopefully you have a time machine backup of your user data.

 

[wpotere]

Yep, save your data and get the OS disk for a re-install. If you need the disks, contact Apple and they will send them to you for a small fee.

 

[Macman45]

Get Those Disks Replaced

And perform a clean install.

As for you Nephews? I shall leave them to you, but a good rule of thumb is:

KIDS+COMPUTERS= Big headache.

Itbis as I suspected pooched.

The only ray of sun is that Apple will replace your scratched disks, and then you can start over.