[P1] OS X Help Please

[david]

On Monday, March 17, 2003, at 09:17  PM, Luke Hinman wrote:

> o.k. sorry, i did not want this to turn into a different forum. i'll 
> get
> disk warrior and give it a try... can't see what the real difference is
> between tech and warrior... besides, booting from 9... you must be 
> able to
> do more stuff when it boots it into 9? i will post when i figure it 
> out.
> thanks.

Lots of things can go wrong with the drive and its contents. Utilities 
like Norton's and TechTool are designed to diagnose and attempt to fix 
almost all of them. DiskWarrior is a one trick pony but it is a very 
important trick. It builds a new disk directory - think of it as the 
library card catalog. The most common disk problem on the Mac is a 
corrupt disk directory and fixing the directory is the most common 
repair. What makes DW so special is that rather than trying to repair 
the current directory, it rebuilds a new one. I've seen it revive disks 
(or at least allow me to retrieve vital data) where no other utility 
has succeeded. TechTool, BTW, goes one step further. It not only 
diagnosis and repairs the drive but it also is a general hardware 
diagnosis tool testing other systems like memory, video, etc.

Booting into 9 is a big deal simply because until very recently Apple 
hadn't been forthcoming about how to create a bootable CD for OS X and 
how to run applications from an OS X CD. One of the issues that makes 
this harder than OS 9 is that some unix system files are supposed to be 
writable and obviously anything on a CD won't be writable. Since 3rd 
party programmers couldn't create a bootable OS X CD they couldn't 
deliver their disk utilities other than as OS 9 bootable.

 From another post you wrote:

> oh yeah. i guess leaving the permissions as my username instead of 
> system
> when i changed system icons doesn't hurt? (i.e. i had changed the 
> finder
> icon in the dock and had to change the permission to copy in a new PNG)

I'm not the most expert *nix guy but I can say this with certainty - 
messing with permissions is not a good idea. Often times when clients 
(or friends and colleagues) have called in a panic about their machine 
acting up, I've found that messed up permissions are the cause. I'd 
suggest that once you get your drive problems under control that you 
fix permissions using Apple's Disk Utility. Then spend some time 
looking around your system and look how the permissions are set for 
different files.

=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=
Good qualities are easier to destroy than bad ones, and therefore
uniformity is most easily achieved by lowering all standards.
  ~~ Bertrand Russell

David