Powerbook Problems - Help Required Please!

[Stan]

A bizarre thing happened the other day...

I was using my PB G4 1Ghz, when it suddenly froze. I pressed the reset button but while rebooting, the screen remained blank (black). I pressed the reset button again, and it booted up ok, but the desktop appeared to have reset itself. The dock contained items like .Mac and the address book, which I do not normally keep there, and other I do use, like Limewire, Photoshop and Elements were gone. In a similar way, all the folders had white backgrounds and scattered icons, unlike the aqua blue and snap to grid I normally use.

While fortunately no data appears to be missing, iPhoto will now not function. The program runs but when loading photos, bombs out. The pictures are still there in the iPhoto library, but some will now not open in preview, giving the error 'the file may be corrupt'.

Although it appears I have got away without much serious damage, I am concerned as to why this would happen, and what I can do to prevent this happening in the future. I regularly repair the disk permissions, allow Panther to recover the vault space, and keep the drive relatively free of heavy loads.

If anyone could suggest anything I would be grateful.

 

[Stan]

No one?

 

[IJ Reilly]

What version of the OS?
How much RAM?
Have you run hardware test CD or any other diagnostics?

It really helps to be more specific when reporting a problem, especially a really weird one like this.

 

[Stan]

OS 10.3.2, 512 RAM. PBook 1GHz (last of the Titanium range). No other issues regarding hardware or peripherals following this incident, it was almost as if a reset occured, but did not delete the extras added by myself, merely moved them back into applications and replaced them with the factory defaults. I still have the problem with iPhoto though - which is a bit worrying. I am not sure what other details to provide, but any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Counterfit]

I think this happened on my Beige G3 not too long ago. I assume it just lost my Dock preferences. I don't mind though, as it's not my "daily driver"

 

[Stan]

A number (about 100) of the photos within the iPhoto library do not now open in Preview, iPhoto or Photoshop, error message "Could not open "DSC..." because a JPEG marker segment length is too short (the file may be truncated or incomplete)". Anyone know of a recovery process for these files? I really need to get these back for work or else I am about one month behind all of a sudden :-(

 

[IJ Reilly]

This is certainly abnormal. I'm going to take a WAG and say you've got some directory damage on your drive. I'd start by rebooting in single user mode and running fsck. If you don't know how to do this, just ask.

Also, I'd get my hands on a disk repair utility, like DiskWarrior. I'd still recommend running the hardware check CD. Couldn't hurt.

 

[Stan]

Thanks for your help, IJ. I do know how to run fsck but was under the impression it did not run on 10.3. Looks like I'll have to pop down to PC World for a disk utility kit then - if anyone has any ideas how to restore those photos though, please let me know!

 

[cjc343]

Backups are essential.

Download a free utility like Carbon Copy Cloner or PsyncX and buy an external HD with at least 20 GB more storage than your HD and then run the utility at least once a week. If something ever goes wrong, you should have an exact backup of your drive. Also, If you ever need to bring all your data somewhere, you can boot off of your disk, saving a lot of trouble.


That's all I can say.

 

[Fukui]

Open disk utility and do a "repair permissions," check if the problem still occurs. You may need to do it a few times, also do a "repair disk" a few times as well. If it doesn't fix the problem, go to your preferences folder in your home folder, and move it somewhere else, like your desktop. Now log out and log back in, see if the problems still occur. It may very well be a bad HD, or a bad sector, or somehow your preferences got corrupted. My G4 Cube once totaly flipped out just surfing the web, and a lot of "bad" things happened since...I since learned it was the HD I bought...just that OSX tripped over the bad sector....