System Preferences Failure

[tamvly]

I just upgraded my external drive to 1TB (FireWire 800) to accommodate more backups of this and that.

As is my habit, I used SuperDuper to create a mirror image of my SSD boot drive on one of the partitions on the external drive. Thinking it wise to actually check to see if the partition would boot, I used System Preferences to point to the new boot drive and restarted the ol' 2008 8x2.8 Mac Pro.

All seemed well with the startup from the new boot device. But when I tried to go to System Preferences on this system, the app failed without ever initializing a window. Odd, I thought, and tried again. Several times.

In hind sight, of course, I should have looked at the system console to see what happened. And I'll do that some time later today when I have more time.

But just curious if any of you out there have had a similar experience? Any theories?

 

[Gregg2]

My first theory in similar cases is a bad plist file. That's probably the problem about a third of the time, in my experience. (rough guess)

You just wanted theories, right?

 

[calderone]

Corrupt Preference Pane is another option.

 

[tamvly]

Well, I haven't yet had the opportunity the reboot from the external drive.

Plist corruption seems a likely candidate ... how to fix is a different issue.

I suppose I can browse around when mounting the external disk and delete a plist on the external while booted from the primary, assuming the external plist will be reconstructed on re-boot. Yes?

 

[tamvly]

I wound up reinstalling OS X on my internal drive, as the Preferences failure migrated to the primary boot disk. Odd.

I then erased the external and re-imaged. All is well.