I have an old Sim City for Classic game on my HD that I decided to get rid of, since I never play it anymore. It doesn’t have an uninstall option so I just dragged it to the trash like I usually do with likewise things. When I went to empty my trash a message came up telling me I needed to restart my computer, so I did. Restart was fine, no problems - same thing happened when I tried to empty my trash again. This time I went through the folder and deleted every file one by one, and found out it’s the application launcher file that’s crashing my system. So, I ran Norton DD. Turned up a bunch of errors, major and minor, that may or may not have been caused by this app: Incorrect child counts in several locations, bundle bits turned on when they should be off, etc. So I went through and fixed all the errors. Then I did a virus scan on the Sim City app - It was clean. But, when I tried again to delete it - crashes again.
So, ok, I figure it’s time to bring out the big guns. I open up my Sudo Delete It, which has gotten rid of similar problems for me in the past. But even that didn’t work - it crashed everything again.
As long as I’m not trying to get rid of it, it doesn’t seem to be affecting anything else - the rest of my system is running fine.
Anyone have any idea why this is happening? Is there a way I can actually delete it, or it it better to just leave it on my system? I hate leaving corrupted stuff sitting on my drive…I’m always afraid it’s going to be slowly devouring my disk while I sleep.
Well, it’s only a year old - it’s the new iMac, 60G, 800MH w/ CD-RW/DVD-R combo drive. I can launch Classic as an application within OSX, but I’m not sure if I can boot into OS9…
You can move around and manipulate your system using Unix commands from the Terminal application in Applications/Utilities. However, you have to know Unix commands to do it (which I don’t) but if you know someone who does, they should be able to help.
Throw in your original OS X install disk, boot from it, and run the “Repair Permissions” utility on the boot drive. That’s generally a good place to start when Mac OS X starts seriously acting up.
Wow! Interesting problem, this would be a good time to take the ten minutes to repair permissions anyway, and I don’t think you really need to boot from the install disk, just open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder. It would be interesting to know a little more about the file, are you comfortable with using terminal? Type ls -la /path/file name and let us know who owns it, and what the permissions are. It’s a lot easier than it may sound, but if you know roughly where is is, it’s easy to type the path, if it’s in the Applications folder, for instance, just type ls -la /App, and hit tab, then type the few first letters of the app name and hit tab again, it will 'auto-complete" the path for you. Good luck!
Hmm, ok, I’ll toddle around with it a bit tonight. I’m comfortable with some Unix so I’ll see if I can work with it in my Terminal. I’ll post another message later to say if it was successful or not…
Ok, I tried all the suggestions. Unfortunately everything I tried generated the same result as before. As soon as my computer attempts to delete the file, my screen darkens and I get the “You need to restart your computer” message (everything also freezes up so I have no choice but to restart).
Aaarg. Is it more trouble than it’s worth to try to get rid of this? If I leave it on my system could it have the potential to cause any damage?
I’m not a Mac guy, but as a Linux user, I’d post the file/permission/owner information here as Mentor suggests. It would give much more insight into the problem. As an aside, there’s a Mac version of fsck (or fsck itself) in OSX, I presume?
I didn’t read that carefully enough the first time. What you’re experiencing is a kernel panic. Pretty rare on the nifty Mac OS X. It’s the equivilent of the old Windows Blue Screen of Death.
Quick Google search (now that we know it’s a kernel panic) indicates that maybe you have Norton something installed? So, here is one thing you can try:
[ul]
[li]Startup with the shift key held down the whole time until you see Finder or your login window. It’ll boot up more slowly than normal. This causes your kext’s not to load.[/li][li]Try trashing the file.[/li][/ul]
Nanoda mention fsck. Yup, it exists. Try this if you ever need to:
[ul]
[li]Startup with Command-S held down. This puts you in single user mode. You can let up on it when you get the command prompt.[/li][li]Just type “fsck” without the quotes.[/li][li]Type “reboot” (I think) when done (no quotes).[/li][/ul]
You could also stay in single user mode and “rm”-ing the file from there. But be careful, because you have all the power to do anything to the computer at that point.
Ooops, I forgot to post the info about the permissions. When I looked at it it listed the ownership as belonging to me (my admin name was there). It also stated that read & write was allowed on it. I’ll try the startup with shift and see if maybe that will work…thanks!
