Strange icon problems in OS X

lucaluca
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
I'm having weird problems involving icons in OS X. Twice yesterday, for no apparent reason, the icons on a couple of files just disappeared, leaving only the name bar. At the same time, it became impossible to drag any icons. Not just impossible to move icons, but I actually couldn't drag them at all (no transparent icon appeared). Also, when I right-clicked the icons in the dock, no contextual menus appeared, the icon just turned dark. It was very strange. I tried relaunching finder and logging in again, but that didn't work. Only restarting fixed the problem. Then it happened again, so I had to restart again, but now it's stopped (as far as I know).



I'm running 10.2.1 on a gigabit ethernet G4.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 3
    neutrino23neutrino23 Posts: 1,562member
    Sorry to bear bad news but I suspect that you have some serious hard drive trouble. I had the same problem and wound up wiping the drive and reinstalling after disk repair attempts failed.



    Try restarting while holding down command-option-S. When it finishes booting up then type



    fsck -y



    Repeat till it repairs everything or seems to not make any more progress.

    Type reboot.



    Do what you can to backup anything you can. I suggest looking in your library folder for the Mail folder, AddressBook folder, etc.



    Even if it seems like things are repaired I would wipe the drive and reinstall OS X after backing up everything possible. Hard to know which files have damaged data even if the directory looks OK.
  • Reply 2 of 3
    stunnedstunned Posts: 1,096member
    Me no mac hardware expert. But if u have applecare or your mac is still under warranty, u better send it for service.



    If u accidentally do something drastic and send in your mac too late, Apple may refuse to repair it for free.
  • Reply 3 of 3
    chironchiron Posts: 1member
    Out of curiosity, have you been using CandyBar? I have just had to dig myself out of the same problem - crashed while rebuilding the desktop in 9.2.2, then found that in Jag the system icons (which I had replaced with CandyBar - chicken or egg?) had disappeared and dragging was impossible. Tried using Desktop Rebuild X, and it told me that there were no desktop databases to delete... tried everything else as well, in the end backed up the lot for safety, then reinstalled Jag using the "Archive and replace" (?) option. Went better than I thought, with only a few utilities needing reinstalling. Still uncertain as to the cause.
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