No Dock - Frozen Desktop... Please Help!

[cycleguy]

Hey.
Alright well I have searched and searched this forum and many others and can't seem to find a solution.
The Problem: Yesterday the dock just quit popping up, so I shutdown and restarted this morning. This morning same problem plus i can't select any files on my desktop. I can access stuff through finder but that's it.

I have tried: restarting in safe mode - same problem
fixed corrupted preference files - i'm sure it helped somehow
fixed overlapped extent allocation files - again i'm sure it helped
ran first aid to repair permissions - still same problem
A few other thing i can't recall now

My Specs:
iBook G4 10.3.9
1.33Ghz PowerPC G4
256MB
55.76GB Harddrive
7GB Free

If you can help on ANY WAY please do. I have tried everything I can find and think of. Oh yah, I don't currently have the OS disk.
Thanks.

 

[CANEHDN]

My solution with these kinds of problems is: Resinstall. It can be pain but it will solve other problems that may be there.

 

[ultimateceej]

Have you tried relaunching the dock?

In Terminal type:

killall Dock

You might also try clearing System caches.

 

[cycleguy]

Also have killed the Dock and cleared system and user cache.
As well reset the PMU and OpenFirmWare..
Help?

 

[mad jew]

I have tried: restarting in safe mode - same problem
fixed corrupted preference files - i'm sure it helped somehow
fixed overlapped extent allocation files - again i'm sure it helped

What do you mean here? What exactly did you do?

Do you have any theme changers installed? If you create a new user account, does the same thing happen there? What apps are running? What third party hardware do you have connected or plugged in?

 

[cycleguy]

What do you mean here? What exactly did you do?

Do you have any theme changers installed? If you create a new user account, does the same thing happen there? What apps are running? What third party hardware do you have connected or plugged in?

No I have no theme changers.
Yes when I created a new user account the same thing happened.
The apps I normally run are Skype, Safari, Firefox, iCal and iTunes.
And lastly I have no third party hardware plugged in.

What have I done?
I restarted in safe mode, fixed corrupted preference files, fixed overlapped extent allocation files, ran first aid to repair permissions, reset the dock, cleared system and user cache, and reset the PMU and Open Firmware.

 

[mad jew]

What I mean is, how did you 'fix' corrupt preference files and 'fix' overlapped extent allocation files?

 

[cycleguy]

I started up in single user mode... ran fsck -yf and that told me I had overlapped extent allocation files, so I found where they were and deleted them.

As for the preference files...I put this in terminal...

find ~/Library/Preferences /Library/Preferences -type f -name "*.plist" | sed -e "s/\(.*\)/\"\1\"/" | xargs plutil -lint

Took care of the problem files..and done.

Anything else I can do?

 

[motulist]

Well, you should run disk utility just to make sure all is well with the disk now. DiskWarrior is the absolutely best disk utility program out there, so you might wanna pickup a copy and run as frequently as you like.