OSX install not going well

P
Posted By
Phosphor
Jul 26, 2003
Views
369
Replies
25
Status
Closed
Search for all parts of PE which might have gotten installed, trash them (I bet your problem stems from something the trial demo installed), repair permissions again and try again.

There is no reason to wipe the drive. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to run fsck, though. Also, when you try to reinstall,you might try copying the cd to the desktop and running the install there rather than directly from the cd itself.

Master Retouching Hair

Learn how to rescue details, remove flyaways, add volume, and enhance the definition of hair in any photo. We break down every tool and technique in Photoshop to get picture-perfect hair, every time.

JO
Jim Ogilvie
Jul 26, 2003
Barbara…

Thanks sincerely for the quick reply. Even though I don’t really need PE on my powerbook, I tried installing it on the PB and it went smoothly.

I did try to look for anything that the trial version might have installed prior to installing the full PE and nothing obvious appeared. Do you know where I might need to look?

One of the things that *appears* to me to be a nice advantage on the Mac side compared to windows is that (I am fairly new, so maybe I am fooling myself on this) there does not appear to be the tendency to have all kinds of dependency files, libraries and such scattered across all kinds of directories when a program is installed. It appears to all go into one folder. So nothing appeared obvious to me when looking for a previous install. I will look again though!

What is fsck? Thats a new one to me!

thanks again.

p.s. couldnt resist playing with PE on the powerbook. This is one very cool program. It seems very help oriented, compared to what I remember photoshop to be like after being forced to use it one afternoon. This is going to be great for helping me design DVD menus.
MR
Mark Reibman
Jul 26, 2003
fsck is a unix command that is a fix and repair utility within unix. It scans the system looking for something out of whack.

You can access it through your terminal utility or restart the computer with the command S key depressed. Your screen will come up black with white text. At the prompt you type fsck -y and hit the return key. After it responds enter the command again, hit return key. When it’s finished type reboot, hit the return key and you’ll go into OS X.
JH
Joe Henry1000
Jul 27, 2003
Jim,

Barbra and Mark gave excellent advice, and I can’t really add anything. One thing about the Mac OS, though. It used to be, in OS 9 and before, that you only had to look for the files related to an application, in 3 maybe 4 places at the max, and many times if you deleted the application you got all the files. OS X changed that somewhat, and now resembles <shiver> Windows a little more in that regard. Files associated with any particular app can and do exist in multiple places including the root level of your system. Search on your hard drive using Barb’s sugestions and you should be able to find all the files you need to delete.

Following Barb and Mark’s advice will hopefully fix your problem. Post back if not.

Joe
JO
Jim Ogilvie
Jul 27, 2003
Thank you to everyone for the great advice. I’m learning more about OSX all the time it seems.

I discovered something a bit surprising. When I run fsck, I end up getting about 60 or so problems found. Orphaned links, or some such. The surprise is, fsck couldn’t fix the problem. It eventually dies with a ‘bus error’ and returns me to the command prompt.

Lately I have been getting Mr. Beachball a lot more than I think I should be. I’ve tried repairing permissions and doing everything I’ve been told, and fsck still can’t fix the problem. So…..

I am going to do a reformat and install. I am going to be ok with this, because I know that the end result will be a better running system. I have an external firewire drive that I can back up all of my important stuff to, and I don’t mind reinstalling the applications that I will need.

I am going to wait a day or so before I do this, but I believe its the way to go. I have too much stuff on there that I dont use anymore, and this will be a nice way to defragment the drive as well.

Since I have never done this before, can anyone tell me whether the disks that came with the machine will allow me to do this fairly painlessly, and will I get the option to reformat the drive with these disks?

Thanks for all your terrific help!

Jim
P
Phosphor
Jul 27, 2003
Orphaned links, or some such.

Woah. You have serious directory damage. The easiest way to fix it is with Disk Warrior. You can reinitialize and reinstall instead, but you will need to do a "zero all data" reformat, which takes several hours. It takes about 7 hours to zero my 40 gig HD, for example. You can do the reformat from the os install disk.

What concerns me is how this could have occurred in the first place. What have you installed besides PE? And what machine is this? Is it a brand-new computer? If so, I would call applecare and set up a case number on this, in case there’s more trouble later.

BTW, to tell you exactly how to zero the drive, we need to know what disks you’ve got.

EDIT I would also run the extended hardware test from your hardware test cd, if you have one.
P
Phosphor
Jul 27, 2003
Odd that it should take 7 hours to wipe a drive

Well, a zero data writes zeros over every single block in the drive, which is a lot of zeros. It takes about 9 min to write a gig of zeros.

This may be tricky. Do you have an os 9 install cd or do you have at least 10.2.3 on an install cd? There was no zero data option on X disks prior to 10.2.3.
JO
Jim Ogilvie
Jul 27, 2003
Barbara…

Nope. Just the disks that I mentioned.

10.2 is the release stamped on the disks that I have.

So there is no option to reformat the drive on the disks that I have?
JO
Jim Ogilvie
Jul 27, 2003
Wow, now I am more confused.

Formatting doesn’t fix a disk? That is definitely new to me.

Ok, so I guess disk warrior is something I will have to acquire. To the apple store with me tomorrow.

I dont have a 9 disks, or know of anyone who does.
P
Phosphor
Jul 27, 2003
Well, once you have zeroed the drive, you’re just going to run software restore and update from there, so don’t worry about that part, unless you want to make partitions this time. The problem right now is how to fix the directory first.

There is a difference between just erasing and the kind of format that is involved in zeroing. A basic reformat takes a minute or two, but it won’t fix any of your problems here, alas.
P
Phosphor
Jul 27, 2003
Formatting doesn’t fix a disk? That is definitely new to me.

Formatting will fix minor errors, but mac formatting isn’t like pc formatting. You have two options on a mac. One, which is what your cd will do, is very basic and essentially just removes data at the upper levels. For a really big problem like this, you need to completely recreate the directory structure. I guess you would say that the mac formatting options are either much more superficial or much deeper than the kind of reformat pc users are accustomed to.

BTW, it’s extremely uncommon to reformat in the mac world these days, because it’s so rarely necessary. Disk Warrior is a good thing to have on hand, in any case.
JO
Jim Ogilvie
Jul 27, 2003
Barb…

Ah, I think I see what you mean now. You’re referring to a quick format (one that erases just the header information but doesnt touch the data on the disk).

I guess what I meant was a full format that actually goes through and kills everything..which you are calling zeroing. Ok, I got it now 🙂

Just called my local apple store and they have a copy of disk warrior in stock, so I will be picking that up tomorrow. Today is backup day for me.

Thanks a bunch for your help!

Jim
JH
Joe Henry1000
Jul 27, 2003
Jim,

Although it’s a great program, before running out and buying Disk Warrior, if it were me I’d try and do a quick reformatting and OS installation. I’d then start up in Single User Mode (as Mark described) and run fsck again. If you still get those orphaned links and/or fsck "dies" with a bus error, then I’d zero all data. Like Barb said, it’s a long process so I always like to try quick fixes first.

The bus error thing has me scratching my head. In the old days, a bus error usually meant there was a memory issue. A lot of the time you could just allocate more memory to the application that you were having a problem with and every thing would be fine. Sometimes the issue was not enough RAM, but obviously this isn’t your problem. Did you ever run the hardware test as Barb suggested? I’m wondering if you might not have some bad RAM.

If you’ve already zeroed your hard drive and the problem cleared up, well there you go. If not run that hardware test and see if it comes up with anything.

Joe
R
Ray
Jul 27, 2003
You see… I’m really "Made4Mac" myself 🙂

But it could be done, right ? You simply open a console (terminal..?) window, then from root, cd "first folder", then run fsck from there ?

I’m just gonna loooooooooove this computer ! 🙂

Ray
P
Phosphor
Jul 31, 2003
Jim, if you mean that disk warrior is still doing its thing, there’s no need to worry. If your disk is badly damaged it can take a loooong time, often a couple of hours, to finish. I heard of one notable case where it took almost 3 weeks! But it did fix the machine that time, too. If you get nervous, you might want to contact Alsoft and ask them, but so far it seems pretty normal.
JH
Joe Henry1000
Aug 1, 2003
I am a pleased outdoor enthusiast with a polymer based portable dwelling (happy camper).

LOL!

Joe
P
Phosphor
Aug 1, 2003
Hi, Jim. Well, I’m glad you got it fixed, but I do find it a little odd that Disk Warrior didn’t take a lot of time and yet didn’t really fix things. That’s not common. Disk Warrior can’t always fix everything, but it does usually take a while to do its thing when it is working.

EDIT Thinking about this. You did get DW 3.0? You did boot from the DW cd to run it?
JO
Jim Ogilvie
Aug 2, 2003
Barbara…

Hmm. Perhaps I wasn’t terribly clear in my messages. DW did in fact take a good long time to ‘do its thing’. But my concern was the multiple hours it took for the machine to boot once DW was completely done (which, as it turned out, was not actually booting it was stuck in a loop). Yes, I have DW 3.0 and booted from the CD. I would say it took DW about two hours to do what it did.

It built a directory and allowed me to preview and test it. Clearly DW did do something, especially after when I interrupted the boot, fsck worked with no errors reported, which if you will recall was the initial problem I think.

The problem ended up being vital files needed for a successful boot were damaged or lost. Or at least, OSX couldnt find them to boot.

But the OS install fixed that part of it.

🙂
T
Tel
Sep 14, 2003
Is the CD with "The hidden powers of photoshop elements 2" compatible with both Mac and PC ?
Look at that, a simple question 🙂

Regards
Tel.
P
Phosphor
Sep 14, 2003
Yup! Look at that; a simple answer. 🙂
T
Tel
Oct 4, 2003
Canon 10D raw format.

I have a friend who is having trouble with Canon’s raw format from a 10D. He does not want to compromise quality by using jpeg so is saving in rawformat. The images end up as around 8megs each. The Canon software will transfer his images to a computer and it automatically converts to tiff format but he cannot open them with either the Canon software or any other program including PE.

Any ideas what’s going wrong? I, unfortunately, haven’t seen either the camera or software so am working a bit in the dark. Hope I’ve explained enough.

Tel.
R
Ray
Oct 4, 2003
Tel

I’m under Windows and I am unable myself to open the TIFF created by the automatic converter. I use
the File Viewer Utility and the pictures are ok. You might suggest to your friend to use the FVU instead of the automatic converter, that could solve his / her problem.

Ray
CS
Chuck_Snyder
Oct 4, 2003
Ray, there’s that wonderful Canon software in action again….looking forward to the Raw converter built into Photoshop CS!
R
Ray
Oct 4, 2003
Chuck, you can be sure I’ll get it! I printed the Photoshop CS detailed new features guide and must
have read it 3 times so far 😉

I also discovered, yesterday, that I could double click on a RAW file and have converted into TIFF. Doesn’t work neither.

I bought a Compact Flash card reader yesterday (SanDisk ImageGate), a USB HiSpeed (a.k.a USB 2.0). On my regular cards, it shows some improvement. On my fastest one, it shows a lot of improvement! No more waiting 15 minutes to get the pictures out of the card! 🙂 May start to shoot Raw again!

Ray
T
Tel
Oct 4, 2003
Thanks Ray, I’ll pass it on.
Tel.
DW
David Whalen
Oct 18, 2003
On Sat, 4 Oct 2003 4:27:35 -0500, wrote
(in message ):

Canon 10D raw format.

I have a friend who is having trouble with Canon’s raw format from a 10D. He does not want to compromise quality by using jpeg so is saving in rawformat. The images end up as around 8megs each. The Canon software will transfer his images to a computer and it automatically converts to tiff format but he cannot open them with either the Canon software or any other program including PE.

Any ideas what’s going wrong? I, unfortunately, haven’t seen either the camera or software so am working a bit in the dark. Hope I’ve explained enough.

Tel.

I convert My RAW Canon 10D pics to TIFF all the time and have no problems viewing them with any of my image software packages. The only thing to be aware of is to use 8-bit TIFF instead of 16-bit TIFF when planning on using Photoshop elements 2.0, because 16-bit TIFF files are not supported in that package.

— David Whalen

How to Improve Photoshop Performance

Learn how to optimize Photoshop for maximum speed, troubleshoot common issues, and keep your projects organized so that you can work faster than ever before!

Related Discussion Topics

Nice and short text about related topics in discussion sections