Well, it did. MacOS X (10.1.5 to be precise) is on one partition, MacOS 9 is on another, and various other operating systems are on yet other partitions.
One day I was booted into OS X and the GUI tanked, and, being without a 2nd computer to ssh in and do command-line tricks from afar, I had to reboot without a proper shutdown.
MacOS X came up fine (ran the obligatory auto-fsck at startup because of the improper shutdown). Then I switched Startup Volume to the OS 9 partition and rebooted, got a momentary happy-mac then an unprovoked reboot, a momentary no-System-Folder icon, then a happy-mac and a boot…into MacOS 8.6!
From MacOS 8.6, I ran Disk First Aid (“volume appears to be OK”), Norton Disk Doctor (“no problems found”), TechTool 3 (likewise), and DiskWarrior (replaced the directory but it reported no material differences). Tried to reboot into MacOS 9 – happy-mac, no-system, happy-mac, MacOS 8.6. Hmmph.
Pulled Finder out of System Folder. Put back in to re-bless the System Folder and perhaps fix up the hosed boot blocks (although the utility programs should’ve caught that). No joy, same results.
Did a fresh install of MacOS 9 and the 9.0.4 updater and moved the main booting files (Finder, System, System Resources) to the old System Folder, replacing the possibly corrupted versions. Reboot and this time MacOS 9 came up just fine.
Next time I rebooted: happy-mac, no-system, happy-mac, MacOS 8.6 again. Repeated process of above paragraph except that I saved the existing files and tested with them one at a time and by trial and error determined that it was the System file, specifically, that required replacement. Made backup copy of fresh new System file to avoid doing full OS reinstalls if this happens again.
Boy did it ever. I’ve had to replace the System file maybe 15 times. It is most likely to happen if I boot into MacOS X and then attempt to switch back to 9, but sometimes just from doing a restart. And my system isn’t hanging on shutdown or crashing or anything.
With a fresh install of MacOS 9 on disk, I’ve run Norton, DiskWarrior, TechTool, Disk First Aid, and the MacOS X Disk Utility on the OS 9 partition to no avail. (They all fail to find any problems to fix or report).
The ruined copies of the System file will not open (the file is a “suitcase” that normally opens to display the enclosed sounds and keyboard resources).
Other, perhaps related, symptoms: The computer loses track of the printer selection between restarts even when 9 boots successfully. Not switching to an incorrect printer but failing to have a selected printer. Go to “Print” in any application yields one of those “File cannot be printed because no printer has been selected in the Chooser” error messages. I have a set of QuicKeys macros that let me switch printers with a keystroke from LaserWriter 8 to Adobe PDFWriter to HP DeskWriter USB, but the macros don’t work until I manually open the Chooser and pick a printer. Also, every time the System file dies, I lose my Finder Labels settings (the custom names and colors). I suppose it is possible that these settings are actually maintained within the System file but I would not have thought so. I always assumed that was kept in Finder Preferences.
I do have the empty-disk resources to back up the whole partition with Retrospect, initialize it, and restore it, but then I’ll spend a day chasing down broken aliases, and a week coping with missing invisible application-registration files, re-entering serial numbers and whatnot as they fail at various rates to run w/o complaint.
'twould be nice if someone has a sense of what could be causing this behavior. What condition would make the System file in an active MacOS 9 System Folder volatile, such that it gets corrupted at the drop of a hat and requires replacement?
The other operating systems are not getting messed up in a similar fashion even when I run them for a couple of days (I used 8.6 for three days to see if there was some process afoot that was eating active system files). It only goes after the one on the MacOS 9 partition.