What manner of sickness be this? -- OS 10.3.9, G4 400MHz

angus mccallumangus mccallum
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
Hello All,



Running OS 10.3.9 on a 400 MHz G4 sawtooth.



About a week ago, the computer started acting strangely on bootup in the morning. A sample of problems and error messages follows:



1. Mail reports that it is retrieving messages from the ISP server, but they do not appear in the Inbox.

2. Firefox refuses to launch, saying (wrongly) that another copy of Firefox is already open.

3. iTunes keeps on saying: "The itunes Library file cannot be saved. An unknown error occurred (-50).

4. [Microsoft] Word cannot open the existing " (Normal)



and so on....



The good news is that I can make all the problems go away by re-booting from another hard drive and running Permissions Fix in Disk Utility. The bad news is that the problems keep coming back.



Any ideas? the problem can't be associated with any new hardware or software: there hasn't been any.



Thanks,

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 1
    angus mccallumangus mccallum Posts: 47member
    By way of an update, I may have an insight into what is causing this problem. It has not deteriorated, so it doesn't seem like a hardware problem - dying processor or HD, or corrupt RAM.



    It seems to me that it may be related to interaction over my home network with my newer Macbook, running OS X 10.5 (the problem computer is a G4 running 10.3.9). My copy of the David Pogue semi-official Missing Manual for Leopard doesn't seem to contain any warnings about what not to do when running Macs with different OS releases on the same network. And both computers behave nicely when rummaging around in each others' hard drives -- impressive, really, that the 10.3.9 OS works well enough in that 'forward-compatible' way. Well done Apple.



    But if anyone has solved similar problems with Macs running different OS X releases on the same network, please let me know.



    Thanks,
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