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Makosuke

macrumors 604
Aug 15, 2001
6,661
1,242
The Cool Part of CA, USA
Re: some of the same

Originally posted by skitsbox
I have not heard of any protection on the panther os but it would seem that there is.
I very, very seriously doubt that there is any sort of protection in Panther--I've seen or heard no indications whatsoever, and since you don't put in a serial number or similar info when you install it, there's absolutely no way that it would know you'd used the install discs on more than one computer. There is no identifying information whatsoever.

And, on the exceedingly small chance that Apple somehow found a way to magically insert a unique serial number on a pressed CD, I still don't see why they'd make the symptom of their restriction random glitches while the software is running--wouldn't it just tell you outright you were doing something wrong?

That said, something is causing these problems, and they're far from universal--there are obviously many people using Panther and few having these problems.

As shadow95 has been getting at, these sound a lot like disk corruption (particularly skitsbox's problems). It could actually be a failure of a physical disk, particularly if the problems grow progressively worse after a clean install, as with skitsbox--I had a very similar problem with a dying hard drive as well as a Samsung drive that needed to be specifically set to ATA66, or the data on the drive would grow progressively more corrupt (though the OS would boot and some apps would run).

I wouldn't touch Norton's utilities that run in the background--I've heard dozens of reports of them causing instability, and not a single report of them helping--and Norton's disk check has been getting less and less reliable over the past few years, so that's suspect, too.

DiskWarrior is an alternative I've had luck with, though I haven't run it recently, and Drive 10 is another I know nothign about. Here's a TidBits article that gives some suggestions on disk problems: http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07451

As for the original no red dot query, using Pacifier to extract the Mail app from the OS install disk and replacing the apparently bad one is good, although it's also possible that there is a problem with an OS framework of some sort that won't be fixed by just replacing Mail.app. In that case a full OS reinstall should do the trick (and if you preserve users, getting back up to speed shouldn't take long, though be cautious about bringing back the bad preference file that caused the problem or the utility you forgot you installed that is the root cause).

Good luck.
 

jevel

macrumors regular
Dec 7, 2003
166
0
I've seen similar problems, and what I did to fix it was to boot with installation DVD, run disktool, repair disk. (The option greyed out when you're running distool from within OS X.)

Also had trouble that noone could remedy, and thsi diskrepair tool found errors. Only thing I could do was a complete reinstall.

-KJ
 
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