What's going on? Lots of problems!

Question

Hi there,
I'm having a few different problems that seem to have happened all at the same time. They are all very annoying.
Firstly, I have a 1gHz eMac, 768MB RAM, MacOS 10.2.8
My first problem is that Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 will no longer open. It crashes on opening. Also, in Adobe Illustrator CS, I can no longer create text. When I click to create text it says "Can't create type". When I'm using Firefox sometimes when I try to type text in it freezes and I have to force quit. I also tried to update iTunes with the auto updater and it got stuck and I had to force quit. I have attempted to repair the disc permissions but that got stuck too and I had to cancel.
All these problems have occurred at the same time. I haven't got a clue what's wrong. I've changed my RAM to see if that was the problem but the same problem was still there. I've also done a safe power up but everything is still the same.
Any help from anyone would be much appreciated.
AndyB
eMac   Mac OS X (10.2.x)   768MB RAM

Answer 1

Hi Andy,
I remember now all too painfully your previous posts about the record-setting unsucessful run with Disk Warrior (talk about 28 Days Later being a horror movie). For what it's worth, I still haven't turned up anyone experiencing anyting even close to that --- Disk Warrior will typically complete it's work within a hour, and the previous all-time longest run I've seen reported was something like 11 days. I posted that problem in the Lounge area when you first posted, and no one there has seen anything like that either.
I don't recall if you ever managed to download and run Memtest. Your problem combines suspect RAM with a corrupted disk directory; either alone is a major problem, combined they make it exponentially harder to fix. It's not impossible that bith RAM DIMMs have several bad memory locations, not severe enough to fail the power-on RAM self-test but enough to cause Disk Warrior to stumble when it has to attempt extensive repairs. Confrming the RAM should be the first priority.
After 3 to 5 runs of Repair Disk with the same corrupt disk directory error messages, you can safely give up on your copy of Disk Utility. Tiger 10.4.2 and later OS X DVDs have a more capable version of Disk Utility that can make directory repairs comparable to Disk Warrior's, but with suspect RAM I wouldn't advise trying that until the RAM is known good.
Your first step should be to save what you can off the hard drive of the eMac. An external Firewire hard drive, coupled with SuperDuper! or CarbonCopyCloner, would be costly but the most straightforward method. Whether you can back up your Home folder and other key data to CD-R with suspect RAM and a corrupted directory is more questionable. You can refer to How to back up and restore your files for more info on backups.
Run Memtest as long as you can and see what it reports on both RAM DIMMs. You'll have to replace whatever DIMMS appear questionable. You can check Crucial for the RAM specs and prices.
When RAM passes, if Disk Warrior still can't complete repairs within two hours or so, then after checking that your backup is readable (there are few computer woes worse than backing up a drive and only later discovering that the backup is unreadable), you can zero the hard drive using Disk Utility while booted from the OS X Install disk. See Disk First Aid: What to do when it finds an error. Then do a clean install of the OS and a Restore of your application software. You want to restore as much as you can from the original discs rather than your backup; since the backup is from a hard drive with keys out of order, some of the data on the backup is almost certainly corrupted. You would then restore your Home directory from the backup (either manually as in the backup article linked above, or using SuperDuper to selectively restore your user data only).
Good luck; you'll need it!