booting os 10.3.9 - finder not starting up

[I<3mymac]

hi

i restarted my ibook g3 (500mhz/192mb ram) last night bacause whatever program i tried to open would "quit unexpectedly".
when i booted my desktop background and the dock were coming up but finder wouldnt start up. i cant get anything to work / if i can it quits after a few seconds.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQe0jqPpSjo

this is a video of what happens. quality is pretty bad but i think u get the idea.

there are others videos of booting in safe mode too. same symptoms though:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TajelJy4KYs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wP4k_lcShQk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snEaijEt8JE

unfortunately i dont have a back up but very important files on my laptop
i have access to windows linux and mac(intel and ppc) machines

i hope thats enough information for u guys

 

[Kristyms1983]

This happened to me too; ironically at the time I was finally backing everything up to my new external hard drive (lacie d2). I am absolutely shattered! 48GB of music, all the work I'd done at school and uni, my pics and heaps of other sh**..

When the machine boots, Finder does not respond, and icons on the desktop disappeared. When I force quit Finder, it relaunches briefly before it stops responding again. I also have to shutdown and restart from an application, then force quit Finder for it to respond to those commands.

I can still open and operate virtually everything from the dock or spotlight search results - ie. I can use iTunes as normal with all my music/playlists in tact, and open documents via word/spotlight - but I can't view or organise folders/files on the hard drive..

I logged in as new user, and the problem did not exist, but I can't access any of the 'original' user's installed applications or saved files because the folders are locked.

Is there a way unlock these folders as the new user with authorization? Or is there some other way to recover all my data without having to save everything to cd?

I'm desperate.