My first horrid OS X experience

K

Kazrog

Mac Metalhead
And hopefully last.

So I decided to move over some fonts last night into my Library/Fonts folder from my old nested OS 9 folders.

Then all of a sudden, while I moved a couple of files, the finder quits itself, and starts restarting itself. Unfortunately, the Finder icon just kept bouncing and I had the constant rainbow ball of death pointer...

Then I go to the dock to fire up the Task Manager and the dock quits itself, slides very cutely off the screen. Then I'm staring at a blank blue screen with nothing but OmniWeb open, and I can't do anything anywhere, constant rainbow ball of death!! No keyboard commands work, force quit, log out, etc., all not working.

So I did something I've NEVER had to do before in OS X - hard restart. Hell, the only time I've ever had to restart OS X is to install OS upgrades or restart into OS 9.1! And that was a nice friendly software restart :)

Anyway, coming back, the system would not boot. I'd get the happy Mac, the stupid rainbow ball, and the Welcome to OS X screen would pop up for about 5 seconds, never get a progress bar, then go away. Then I'd be stuck in a stupid blue screen with a mousepointer, going nowhere, no drive activity, etc...

So I'm back to OS 9.1 by way of booting from my G4 install CD and then running startup disk from my hard disk and booting into my OS 9.

I'm at work today on the stupid PC, but now I have to get my OS X CD back from my dad, and hope that it can fix my OS X, and who knows what it will do with my 10.0.3 installation...

I'll post here again when I do this. I am pissed though, this should NEVER happen in OS X, or any other OS for that matter. Hopefully, in subsequent versions, OS X will be better at fixing itself
 
Just for kicks, you might try running Disk First Aid after booting from a CD or other volume. Ya never know.

-Rob
 
Thanks for the tip, but I already did that, fixed a bad bundle bit, and still it would not boot OS X.
 
Seems to me like something must've changed whilst you were moving your fonts there. You might try to restart and hold down option-v (before you see the happy mac). This puts you into verbose mode, which shows you all that is happening under the fancy GUI when the system boots. It just might, if you read fast enough, show you what's wrong. You could be able to ascertain at what point the system stops booting. Ahh... and then there's something about starting up in single user mode, but that's more complicated, and I really don't know very much about it.
 
Problem solved.

After a pain in the ass reinstall/fix of OS X, it still would not boot. So I went into OS 9 and moved the fonts out of my library, and rebooted. Then it booted into OS X just fine!

Then I had to re-upgrade to 10.0.3. Now it's all back to normal :)
 
This happened to me too (with some old type 1 fonts from 1992 - I think the font suitcases might have been slightly corrupted, but that's just a gut feeling) Removing the fonts while in 9 worked as well.
 
verbose mode: apple-v
single-user: apple-s
console login: >console

Just thought I'd clear that up... It has changed from the pb.

I'm glad your system is back up!
 
Thanks for the tips...

I think the fonts are corrupted as well. I think I'm going to wait to fully migrate all my fonts until Extensis Suitcase is out for OS X. Meanwhile I'm going to go through ATM and find all my corrupted fonts (I have about 300 megs worth of fonts, some of which are from 10 years ago, so corruption is VERY likely...)

Anyway, I'm just happy to be back in OS X!
 
I think I read somewhere in Apple's documentation that the System folder in Mac OS X could not be modified. I also think I read, that if you want to add fonts to your system, you need to store them in your user folder, in the appropriate folder of course, I may be incorrect on that one. Are OS 9 and OS X fonts compatible? I don't know if they are one in the same.
 
User folder fonts are only available to the user though, not to the entire system, so if I have several users that want to use that font I have to make multiple copies ??? Naaahhh... just put em in the system so they are universal :)

(But perhpas you are right, who knows )




Admiral
 
They should go in /Library/Fonts/ to be available to all users, not in /System/Library/Fonts/ which is for the standard fonts only.

Which is great because finally I can expect everyone to have certain fonts and not have deleted Palatino or something because they didn't like it.
 
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