Weird OS Behavior - Reinstall OS?

[steiney]

Hi All,

I've been having minor finder window glitches for a while, such as not being able to view the top few rows of icons in a window after deleting a bunch of files, or or the window starting out with half of the first row cut off.

Recently, weirder things have been happening.
-Individual window settings changing on their own.
-External devices taking forever to load, or refusing to, even USB controllers such as mice and joysticks.
-[The weirdest] About 25 minutes ago, I deleted 16 files from my Main HD directory, and while I was doing something else a few minutes later, the window was still opened, and I literally watched the files reappear in the window, one by one. I am not making this up! In addition, the files that reappeared still appear to be located in the trash as well. I literally have both the HD window and the Trash window open, which both show the files I deleted in them. That can't be good.

So my question is do I need to reinstall my OS? I'm on a Macbook Pro with OS 10.4.11. I've got the install disc and all. If I do need to reinstall, do I just back up my User folder and Applications folder to and external HD and then run the reinstall disc? Do I then have to install all of my old applications one by one?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you,

steiney

 

[djackmac]

About 25 minutes ago, I deleted 16 files from my Main HD directory

This is the first problem I see. There should only be 4 folders on the top level directory of your drive and those folders consist of Applications, System, Library, and Users and everything else contained in their appropriate subdirectories. So I suspect without looking at your directory structure and file saving techniques that you have contributed to your own issues you are having.

Your best course of action is to move these files off of the top level or the directory tree and into their appropriate subdirectory (i.e. under users/youruser/documents for example) and then trying to delete what you want to delete. After this is if you want to properly reinstall your system and restore your data and apps. Create a disk image (.dmg) of your hard drive saving the .dmg to an external drive of course. After verifying the mounting the .dmg of your HD, you can then reformat your HD and reload your OS. Following this you can use migration assistant to restore your data from the mounted disk image of your HD and of course run all of your updates before or after restoring your data. My personal preference is to load the OS, create a dummy admin user, run all updates, then migration assistant to restore data and apps and running software update again to make sure Apple apps are up to date. After this repair permissions for a couple of runs to top it all off.