Hi Beth, These are just indications that this Mac suffered severe directory corruption.
At one end of the spectrum, severe directory corruption can render a Mac totally useless until you reformat the hard drive and reinstall your system. At the other end of the spectrum, minor direction corruption can cause system errors, unpredictable behavior and occassional file damage. When you look at the extremes of directory corruption, this Mac's problems fall somewhere in between. My guess is this user was experiencing problems to some degree prior to all of this happening. Ward Oldham on 9/23/2002 8:45 AM, Beth Ernst at bernst at fastline.com wrote: > Ok, guys, I have been working on Macs for over 12 years now and thought I had > seen my share of weirdness, but I have never seen this happen. > > At one of our remote locations a user called me to complain that they were > having problems with their machine acting strange. They tried to reboot and > got the flashing question mark. They then ran Tech Tool and got the machine to > boot, but when they went to use Suitcase it said it couldn't find the > application. That's when they called me. I popped on the machine with Network > Assistant and when I clicked on the hard drive icon I was surprised to find > that many of the system files as well as some files from various applications' > folders were residing at this level. In addition the entire Utilities folder > was gone. (which is where Suitcase resided) In all when looking at the hard > drive there were over 5,000 items listed at the main hard drive level which > should have been located elsewhere. I checked the view options, this was not a > case of all the folders being expanded or viewed other than by name. The user > said that when she ran Tech Tool it told her there was a problem with ! > the system. > > Is it possible the machine did this itself? Outside of something really freaky > going on with the system, I'd suspect someone was playing around but I don't > want to accuse anyone if it is possible that a corrupt system could have > caused this. Anyone ever had anything like this happen before? The machine is > a blue/white G3 running OS 8.6. > > By the way, my co-worker's home machine is back up and running after the help > you guys gave us on straightening out his system. I've suggested he backup his > info and partition his drive though if he plans to continue running both OS 9 > and X. Thanks for your help on that one. I'm trying to get my company to buy > me a new machine and OS X so I can work with it. > > Thanks! > Beth > >> ---------- >> From: Jerry Yeager >> Reply To: macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu >> Sent: Sunday, September 22, 2002 11:03 PM >> To: macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu >> Subject: MacGroup: Hmm, those M$ folks manage to move fast on >> >> the DRM stuff, but still leave the Mac users of Office etc waiting for >> some very serious and necessary security updates. What is DRM? >> >> This link should answer that one: >> >> http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/27232.html >> >> No more Elvis Costello cds for me! Drat! and I really did like his work. >> >> Jerry >> >> >> >> >> The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will be September 24 >> For more information, see <http://www.aye.net/~lcs>. A calendar of >> activities is at <http://www.calsnet.net/macusers>. >> >> >> > > The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will be September 24 > For more information, see <http://www.aye.net/~lcs>. A calendar of > activities is at <http://www.calsnet.net/macusers>. > > The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will be September 24 For more information, see <http://www.aye.net/~lcs>. A calendar of activities is at <http://www.calsnet.net/macusers>.
