Folder causes Finder to crash

Question

Hi,
Any ideas?
Dual 500Mhz Powermac G4 OS 10.4.11 1GB SDRAM
I have a folder of Excel spreadsheets - being self-employed they are invoices, mostly single pages. All worked okay for several years until I upgraded to Microsoft's Office:Mac 2008.
Now the finder crashes if I click on this folder or try to open it - I can find no way to access these files now. Even transferring the folder, via a portable hard drive, to another Mac has not solved the problem.
Creating new spreadsheets with the new version of Excel, it will not allow me to "save as". Are these problems all related?
Cheers
Martin

Answer 1

martbedd wrote:
Trying to open the folder with "open" in Terminal - same crashing result??
Yes, that's not really a surprise - open just opens the target with the application registered as default in MacOS. That's fine in the case of jpegs, but the default application for opening folders is Finder.
In Finder, make a new directory in your home director and rename it "foo" (because names with spaces in are less clearly readable in Finder).
Open Terminal.
Type `cp -rvf ` (no quotes, with the spaces).
Drag & drop the folder with the spreadsheets in to the terminal.
(hopefully you can do this without Finder crashing - let me know if you can't)
When you drop the folder you should see the full "/path/to/the/folder" now shown in the terminal, and the terminal's cursor should be one space after the end of the word. Delete that last space, then type "/* " (forward-slash, star, space). The command in the terminal window will now read:
`cp -rvf /path/to/the/folder/* '
(there will be the prompt before this in the window, the bit that was already there before you started typing, probably something like "Martin's imac $" - don't worry about that it, it's not part of the command).
Now drag and drop the folder "foo" to the terminal and let go. In Terminal hit enter and you should see a bunch of lines go past saying "copying spreadsheet.xls from x to foo".
Take a look in the foo folder & see if you can read your files.
Stroller.