Hanging Desktop and missing icons within OS X

S

speedo72

Registered
Hello I am wondering whether anyone can offer any advice on the problem I have.

I have an iMac G4 which is running mac OS X 10.2.8 (or whatever the latest one out is). I regularly update the software via the sofware update. I had no problems with the computer until I downloaded two updates via the software update process. These udates (downloaded on 16th of October 2003) were

Quicktime 6.4 (I think)
iTunes 4.1 (I think)

after being prompted to restart the computer mac os x reboots but initially It was stopping when the desktop screen appears (without any icons).

After retrying a few times the system still did not start completely but the dock appeared, but none of my desktop icons most importantly my apple hard drive icon or the menu bar at the top appeared.

The dock seems active but when you click on one of the dock items e.g. iTunes the system freezes (I het the spinning beach ball)and has to be restarted via holding down the power button. Can anyone suggest how I can overcome this problem I really don't want to lose everything I have on the computer which might be the case if I have to reinstall. Also I dont have all of mac os x on disk only the intial version that was sent to me to upgrade from 9.2.2.

Thanks
 
Can you at least boot in safe mode (hold Shift immediately after pushing the power button) or single-user mode (ditto for Cmd-S)?
 
I have tried to boot into safe mode but its taking ages. So far I have waited 15 minutes. All I have is a blue screen and a spinning beachball. I will continue to wait to see if something happens but it isn't looking god at the moment How long do I hold down the shift key for? the last time I relaeased once I saw the grey apple.

anymore suggestions?

Thanks
 
repair your permissions!! after these updates, the list of repairs i had was nearly as long as my arm. always repair your permissions after installing anything with software update. let us know if that doesn't work but i'm guessing it will take care of most of it.
 
If you can boot from another drive try moving the preferences folder out of home/library/. If you can't boot from another drive, I'd suggest safe mode and moving the directory, but since that is not working for you, it might not work.
 
Did you try booting into single-user mode (Cmd-S)? From there, you can run fsck, which checks your disk; I'm not quite sure how you would repair permissions via the command line.
 
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