Journal: News & Comment

The troubles

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My Mac must have heard me take its name in vain. A couple of days ago Mac OS X mysteriously refused to boot. I did some tweaking and playing and reinstalling, and things came back to life.

Now, though, if I let things start up normally, everything is fine except for two things:

• Disk images will not mount (the message "Waiting for Disk Copy helper..." appears for awhile, then Disk Copy quits). That means I can't install or reinstall anything that comes as a disk image. Which is almost everything for Mac OS X. Grr.
  
  
• The mouse doesn't work. I mean any mouse, using the old Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) plug on the back of the Mac or on my keyboard, or the newer Universal Serial Bus (USB) on an expansion card I've installed.

What's weirder is that keyboards do work. If I set up the disabled-accessibility features to use keyboard keys to replace the mouse, that works fine, and I can type at will. Even stranger, if I reboot in "Safe Boot" mode (holding down the Shift key), ADB and USB mice work again. But disk images still won't mount. Everything is normal in Mac OS 9 if I start with that old operating system instead.

So there are two things wrong: some kind of program conflict for the mice, which is resolved by starting up in Safe Boot mode; and another kind of file corruption or something which is preventing disk images from loading. I could probably fix the first one with some troubleshooting, but I suspect the second requires more drastic action.

I've tried repairing my disks and fixing disk permissions, zapping the parameter memory, and all sorts of things. No dice.

I may have to try a reinstall of the operating system, which is a huge big pain—I almost feel like I'm using Windows. Sigh.

Anyone have any advice?

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