Mac Troubles…
Hi guys! I’m writing this post to document problems I’ve been having with my main system, a 20″ iMac. If you know what may be up with it, please comment, or send me an email to SphereCat1@gmail.com.
Step 1: Finder crashes.
The first thing that happens is that the Finder freezes. No big deal, I’ll just Relaunch it, right? No. I click the Relaunch button, it quits, and nothing else happens. If I try to restart it by clicking the icon in the Dock, an error pops up that says “The Application Finder cannot be launched. -10180″. After that, it just goes downhill.
Step 2: Things quickly fall apart.
After the Finder has stopped working, the rest of the system falls apart around my ears. Apps that rely on the Finder for anything crash as soon as they try to access it. External drives are no longer accessible by any means, and trying to umount them from the command line freezes Terminal. The shutdown and reboot commands start throwing “Illegal Instruction” errors. And trying to shutdown or reboot from the Apple menu manages to close everything, but then freezes at the point where only the wallpaper is visible.
Step 3: Hard reboot.
After that, a hard reboot is the only remaining option. So, I hold the power button till it’s off, then turn it back on. Here’s the really interesting part: It freezes before the login screen appears. The login window does appear eventually, but I was waiting at a blue screen for the time it took me to write the intro and first paragraph of this article (About 3-4 minutes, I think). After that, everything works normally. After login, the Finder starts up just fine, and it’s like nothing ever happened.
It’s generally agreed that error -10180 is caused by a failure to access an external disk. The most recent occurrence happened while trying to run Time Machine. Even more odd, but probably just coincidental, was that Firefox had crashed and was refusing to start just minutes earlier, which was why I was trying to run Time Machine. Although now that I think about it, I was working in Firefox last time this happened too, although it didn’t crash.
This has only started happening since I installed Snow Leopard, and even more recently only since I started using Time Machine. It’s only happened twice, but it was identical both times. If anyone has an idea why this is happening, please, let me know. I’d prefer not to have to stop using Time Machine, but I may have no choice.
Billy