Finder / OSX 10.6.8 not working anymore

[martinnoweck]

Hello everybody,
I don't know if this is the right place in the reduser forum, if not please feel free to redirect this post:

- I downloaded REDCINE-X PRO Build 12 and wanted to install it today
- before starting the install per drag and drop I made a time machine backup of my mac pro (2x2.8GHz Quad Core Intel Xeon 2008) running 10.6.8
- while "installing" I got an error message which I skipped and then I restarted the mac to make another attempt of installing REDCINE X PRO 12
- since then my mac pro is behaving strange:

a) the finder doesn't show folders anymore as icons, only as text
b) only single files like stills or *.pdf are shown on the desktop, no folders
c) even on external drives finder doesn't show folders anymore
d) if i try to doubleclick something nothing happens
e) if i select "shutdown" or "restart" from the Apple-Menu nothing happens
f) i can only perform a hard shutdown pressing the power button long
g) if i try to go to the timemachine backup, the desktop disappears and only the background image stays there

anyone knows what to do? any tip / hint / help would be greatly appreciated - best wishes and kind regards,
martin

[William Albertini]

Restart using original installer disk (hold down C) run disk utility.

[martinnoweck]

Thanks William - Disk Utility reports Volume: "Macintosh HD" is ok
any other toughts?

Best wishes and kind regards,
Martin

[Jeff Kilgroe]

What was the error message when you first tried to install?

Seems as if something has been corrupted, could be a few different causes and it's difficult to say with the info given. Can be an early sign of HDD failure as it seems more serious than a random glitch.

I would boot your system from another Mac or bootable volume if you can, or make a new external to boot from with the Installer disc. From there, you can try restoring your main system drive via the time-machine backup.

[martinnoweck]

Thanks Jeff,
I am sorry I didn't take a note of the exact error message.
I wanted to drag and drop the new redcine-x to the application folder and it said something like "redcine is busy" or "in use" - but I wasn't running any program at that time - like i said, I didn't pay much attention and thought a restart might help ...
Anyway - I am running the restore via timemachine right now ... and know i got another error message:
"An Error occured during restore - please restart"
I will try with an older backup version of timemachine.
Do you think I should use a "fresh" hard drive?

best wishes and kind regards,
Martin

[martinnoweck]

now it says "an error occured while erasing your restore destination disk"

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Sounds like your drive is bad. Try restoring the backup to a new/good drive and see what happens.

[Subhadip Sen]

I had a similar issue where all folders simply vanished randomly and other side effects too. Unfortunately whatever the problem was took out Time Machine along with it, so there's no access to backup. On a different system, I copied the drive onto a new one, but that didn't help - something seemed broken in the OS X installation. The source drive was perfectly fine too. Backup your important files on a different system, you will probably have to format the drive and start from scratch.

Back then, searching the issue on forums etc. I stumbled upon a possible fix that worked for some people, didn't for most. It had something to do with cleaning folder cache in Maintenance or something approximating, but this was a couple of years ago, so I don't remember very well. Give it a search, you might find something.

[martinnoweck]

Good morning and thanks everybody - this forum is a wonderful place, I admit that I placed a similar entry on a german apple user forum (because I felt it was more an OSX problem) and ... no one. on reduser: bam bam bam ;-)

Like you suggested - either the drive itself had gone bad or there was too little space, anyway:

I took out my system drive, took one of my spare drives, started from osx dvd, formatted the spare drive and time machine restored the moment just before things went wrong.

Now redcine x (version 10) is up and trancoding again.

knock on wood ...

One more benefit: the new drive is much bigger than the old one, so I partioned it before time machine did the job. Mmh ...

two more questiosn:
- any experience with cloning the system drive (for example in terminal) to another drive, just in case something similar happens someday, so I just swap the drives instead of running timemachine?
- does timemachine take advantage of faster drives / connections (for example fw800 instead of usb 2)?

best wishes from the former east german border (= in the middle of nowhere) and kind regards,
martin

[Vico Martin]

I allways carry a clon of my system HDD, try carbon copy cloner, easy and can save the day.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Another vote for Carbon Copy Cloner. Best way to back up a system drive on OSX.