[X4U] Combination software problem

Brett George brettgeorge at comcast.net
Sun Jan 14 11:22:52 PST 2007


You're right about the discs, in order to do any real trouble-shooting, 
you need those OS discs. In the meantime, do you have a bootable CD such 
as Norton Utilities, TechTool or Symantic? It's always a good idea to 
rebuild your permissions, optimize your hard drive and various other 
little things when you add or delete software.
If you can do that, it MAY solve your problems with Safari and such. But 
I'm not sure. Ever since I upgraded to 10.4.x, I've had problems with 
Safari. It got so bad that it wouldn't even let me log in anymore. So I 
said the heck with it and have been using FireFox ever since.
Oh, I have a G4 Digital Audio with OS 10.4.8. There isn't much of a 
difference between our 2 machines.
Back to your problems. Worse comes to worse, you can do a software 
reinstall and that's where you would need the OS discs. Running Disk 
Utility won't do much good unless you are booted up on a different OS. A 
CD or and other hard drive or something. It can't do what it needs to on 
an active OS.

The DVD problem is a common one as far as I can tell. VLC is what I use 
as well and it works great. I have an external DVD burner/player too.

I don't know if any of this rambling is of any help or not. If you want 
to discuss this in more detail, feel free to email me. I DO have several 
current help manuals for OS 10.4 and would be happy to give you a hand 
if I can.

brett


David Candler wrote:
> Hi.  I'm a fairly new user of Macs and OSX.  I'm running a PowerMac G4 
> AGP Graphics with 10.4.8 and it's been trouble free since I bought it 
> last October.  Yesterday when I attempted to play a DVD, DVD Player 
> complained about an "Initialization Error error: nilP"  Thinking that 
> perhaps some settings had gotten messed up somehow, I dragged that 
> Settings folder from ~/Library/Application Support/DVD Player to the 
> trash, but that was unsuccessful.  I shut down and restarted the 
> machine which didn't help either.  In fact my problems compounded 
> because when I wanted to go online to research this problem on Google, 
> Safari would start but not display a window.  I could only access its 
> menu bar and clicking File-New Window would not bring up a window 
> either.  Then I noticed that Mail.app had some strangeness.  The main 
> mailboxes (Inbox, Drafts, Sent, Trash) were now named 
> INBOX_SPECIAL_MAILBOX_NAME, etc and instead of RE: in replies in the 
> message list I now have REPLY_SUBJECT_PREFIX.  Otherwise mail is 
> working fine, and Firefox is working in place of Safari.  I'm in the 
> process of downloading VLC, which I expect would work fine in place of 
> DVD Player.
>
> I recently removed the original DVD-ROM drive and installed a Pioneer 
> DVR-111D burner.  I installed MacTheRipper, DVD2One and Burn to do 
> some ripping and burning.  DVD Player was working for a couple of days 
> after all that, though.  In my research on Google, I came across few 
> examples of the DVD player problem and what I did find seemed to 
> indicate that Shapeshifter can be a cause of some of these problems.  
> I hadn't used it in a while anyway, so I deleted what I could find of 
> it.  That didn't seem to help me, though.  I also ran the 'Fix 
> Permissions' in Disk Utility.  No joy.
>
> I'm hoping some of you helpful people can point me in the right 
> direction.  I have 10 years of experience with Linux (just home 
> desktop use, though) before this so I don't mind digging into config 
> files.  By the way, this machine didn't come with the 10.4 disks but 
> I'm thinking this is a good time to get them.  Thanks in advance for 
> your help!
>
>
> ==============================
> David Candler     dcandler at sasktel.net
>      Chaplin, Saskatchewan Canada
> ==============================
>
>
>
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