Help!!

[ghm007_2000]

I was using my powerbook (12 inch, 1 ghz, panther), when all of a sudden, Quicktime froze and the rainbow-spinning beachball came on... after a few minutes, I restarted the laptop. It turned on fine, until when it starts to load the Finder... the top-bar never comes on, and the spinning beachball comes on... and finder NEVER starts!!! It stays like that! What do I do???

If you cant' tell... I'm a bit panicked... didnt' know just restarting could lead to THIS!!

 

[Black Morty Rackham]

Most likely, the Finder's preferences file has gotten corrupted. Try to log on to a different account, and then, possibly via the terminal, remove the com.apple.finder.plist file from your Library/Preferences. It might help.

 

[gigglebyte]

I am sure you ment single user mode since you can't get to terminal if they can't get into their user...you could also have some disk corruption and you can check that by restarting the comp and holding down the Apple Key + S until you get a black screen and white text. Wait for the text to finish scrolling and if you have 10.3 it will say Localhost : root # and 10.2 will say sh-2.05a #. when you get this type fsck -y for 10.2 and fsck -fy for 10.3 and see if anything comes up with out double astricks to the left...if there are items that don't have the astricks then you have an issue and run the fsck again...if they are still there then you have issues and will either need to get a 3rd party utility and see if that can fix it or nuke the drive and reload

 

[ghm007_2000]

I tried the fsck -fy after apple+s at startup, and it said "the volume Macintosh HD appears to be OK". And it turned on just fine! The ball was spinning for a bit... but it's fine!

THANK YOU!!!