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TICKET ARCHIVE -> "writing to Your Preferences Disk Has Failed"

arendanton - Aug 18, 2005 - 3:31 am

A few hours ago I opened Apple Mail and the program basically acted like it was the first time I'd used it. It asked me if I wanted to import old mailboxes and if I wanted to see the list of new features. Also, the window was at a completely different size and position. The same thing with the window size and preferences seems to be occurring with Safari. So far those are the only programs I've found the problem in.

When I try to change the preferences in Mail I get an error message that I think is the problem. It says: "Writing to your preferences disk has failed. Your preferences may not have been saved. The permissions on ~/Library/Preferences may be wrong or your disk may be full."

I've never seem this before. Any help would be much appreciated

Thanks,
Arend

philippe99 - Aug 18, 2005 - 9:57 am

Arend, welcome to macosx.com

(Could you try to repair permissions
(must be admin)
Launch Applications/Utilities/DiskUtility
On the left pane, select the drive
On the right, select the First Aid (or SOS) tab
Then click on repair permissions and let run; don not worry about messages like " new permissions...."
Quit DiskUtility
Shutdown and reboot

Regards
Philippe

arendanton - Aug 18, 2005 - 12:45 pm

Philippe,

Thanks for responding. Unfortunately, that did not work. I still get the same error message as before. Would reinstalling Mail and Safari fix the problem, or is it definitely a problem with my preferences?

Do you have any other advice?

Thanks so much,
Arend

philippe99 - Aug 18, 2005 - 12:54 pm

Could you download Onyx
http://macapple.free.fr/titanium/english.html
and use it to clean the caches, system caches included (need a restart)

Philippe

philippe99 - Aug 18, 2005 - 1:02 pm

What we can also do
Quit Mail
In a Finder Window, select your Home icon on the left
On the right go to Library -> Preferences
Move the com.apple.mail.plist file to the Desktop
Restart Mail: results ?

Same idea for Safari: com.apple.Safari.plist

Philippe

arendanton - Aug 18, 2005 - 3:59 pm

So I tried using Onyx, but that didn't seem to work either.

Regarding moving the preferences files to the desktop, I think that found the problem, but I don't know how to solve it. There are no preferences files for those two programs, which leads me to believe that somehow they got deleted in addition to the main problem.

By the way, I tried changing the preferences in Internet Explorer and it worked just fine. Also, I'm running Mac OS X 10.3.4.


Any other ideas?

Much appreciated,
Arend

philippe99 - Aug 18, 2005 - 4:11 pm

??
In ~/Library/Preferences, where ~represents your Home folder, you must have
a com.apple.mail.plist and a com.apple.Safari.plist files.
Philippe

arendanton - Aug 18, 2005 - 4:17 pm

I swear, those files don't seem to exist anymore. I even ran a search for them.

Perhaps they got deleted from the Disk Utility?

-Arend

philippe99 - Aug 19, 2005 - 3:34 am

No, DU does not delete them when repairing
Philippe

arendanton - Aug 20, 2005 - 10:38 pm

Oh well. I've switched to Firefox and Thunderbird since I can't get that working. Thanks for all your help.

philippe99 - Aug 21, 2005 - 5:29 am

Arend, thank you fo using macosx.com
Regards
Philippe