Some Apps Won't Launch

Big Al

Big Al

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I'm running OS 10.2.8. A few weeks ago, I began having problems launching certain apps. Mostly I get errors like this:

"The application "Film Factory" could not be launched because of a shared library error: ";<Film Factory OS X (T)><CarbonLib><CFMPriv_HTMLRendering><>"

After moving some files (that had the modified date of when my problem began) to a temp folder, the error changed at the end from the CFM deal to just <>.

There doesn't seem to be a pattern. Most but not all Apple apps work (Safari doesn't even give me an error, it just won't launch). Some apps that won't launch live on my internal OSX HD, some are on my external FW drive.

Disk Utility finds an error and rebuilds the catalog file sucussfully. But if I verify, I get the same message that the same thing needs to be repaired, as if it didn't "stick." I've repaired the permissions with no change. I've heard about single mode and FSKC or something. What's that? I have Disk Warrior 3 and it fixed several problems (Safari launches now), but not the shared library deal. Interestingly, Netscape 7.1 never had a problem. I reinstalled the 10.2.8 combo update to no avail.

I can load Classic, but I can't load IE, Photoshop 7, Illustrator 10, GoLive 6, FlashMX, Cinema 4D, Epson FilmFactory, Fetch 4, DropZip and Expander 7. I would like to reinstall some of these but since Expander can't load, I can't seem to run any installers either. Damn it!

What the hell? What's my best course of action? I'm so rusty at this. OSX has been rock solid for me and I never have to do any of this crap anymore. I'm running OSX on a small 4 GB internal drive, (yes that's right, on my beige G3/266) so I can't easily do a fresh install without moving a bunch of stuff.
Thanks for any help!

Alex










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well, first off I'll hand out my advice that your boot volume being more than 50% full most of the time is just bad karma. But you can feel free to ignore me, especially since that would mean that you would only have 2G of working space on your machine, and more than half of that is probably the OS install.

And yeah, I don't think you're going to be happy doing a fresh install, but I don't see a solution other than some sort of install. And I'm really fond of formatting drives that give you self recurring corruption errors.

Not to sound insensitive, but I think you just need some more drive space there, and you need to do the install thing that you loathe to do. Since the beige's aren't very fond of multiple internal hard drives, maybe a PCI firewire or USB card and an external firewire or USB2 HD. You could do all that and have 120GB hanging out there for like $200. And all that is portable to another machine in the future so it's not wasted should this machine stop being useful ... which it's on it's way to doing. :-/

well, that's my advice. Maybe someone cooler than I will come along and tell you something different.
 
theed said:
Not to sound insensitive, but I think you just need some more drive space there, and you need to do the install thing that you loathe to do. Since the beige's aren't very fond of multiple internal hard drives, maybe a PCI firewire or USB card and an external firewire or USB2 HD. You could do all that and have 120GB hanging out there for like $200. And all that is portable to another machine in the future so it's not wasted should this machine stop being useful ... which it's on it's way to doing. :-/
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply! Actually, I do have an external 20GB FireWire drive. This drive is also pretty full, but I could clear up space. Got a lot of old game demos in there! How much space would I need? Does the fact that I get the same problems even when I log in as Root or as a fresh new user tell you that the problem really is down deep and that a clean install should do the trick?

What type of re-install should be done? Can I ask any more questions?

Thanks!

Alex
 
I'd say, if the Firewire drive is connected to your G3 and all that, use a tool like Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the contents of your internal drive to the Firewire drive and do a clean install (as in boot from the OS X install CD, use Disk Utility to erase the internal drive, and do a clean install of OS X). Or you can use CCC to copy your OS X system back to the internal hard drive, and keep the rest of your stuff on the Firewire drive.
 
arden said:
I'd say, if the Firewire drive is connected to your G3 and all that, use a tool like Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the contents of your internal drive to the Firewire drive and do a clean install (as in boot from the OS X install CD, use Disk Utility to erase the internal drive, and do a clean install of OS X). Or you can use CCC to copy your OS X system back to the internal hard drive, and keep the rest of your stuff on the Firewire drive.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the advice. Upon further digging, I determined that 10-18-03 was the date where my troubles began. I have a MacOSXUpdate10.2.8.pkg receipt on that date. I also had a combo version three weeks later. So was the update on 10-18 the questionable update and why wouldn't the "good" update fix it? This may explain why disk utilites don't find the problem since maybe it's just a glitch and not a corrupted file.

Should I delete either of these? I also booted into single user mode and ran "fsck -y" deal five times to no avail. Not sure what the screen was saying. I had to do it blind since my ATI video card didn't work in that mode and I don't the adapter for the built-in video.

Thanks.
 
I'm with people on the clean install...that used to happen to me in OS 9. Happened a lot, and my apps wouldn't work. So if you haven't already clean install from the newest CD you have is the way to go, then run the SW updater again.
 
I think I'd just copy stuff off assuming I could re-create the system from the new install rather than using Carbon Copy Cloner if I'm short on disk space. To make a 4 GB image with CCC, you need 8GB of free drive space on the destination volume. That's just the way it works, it makes an image, and then makes another image from that image to get all of the stuff back in the system that's supposed to be there. Netrestore has no such limitations, it just goes. And the compressed disk image version is usually 50% to 70% the size of the original used space, depending on your content.

yeah, this is reminiscent of Mac OS 9 a bit, but I don't get nearly as many random crashes, I have way less fear of third party software ruining my system, I reinstall a misbehaving OS X system as often as I would reinstall a good OS 9 system. But it very much sounds like the OS got borked somehow, and it could very well be related to 10.2.8.crappo. Until we get a really advanced filing system that could truly undo itself to a recent date, or everyone runs Retrospect religiously, then we'll just have to accept that when the OS truly borks itself up, you reinstall. fsck is nearly worthless, as the things it fixes are almost never what's wrong any more.
 
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