Mail and Safari don't start any more after power failure

[rabatjoie]

Hi,

I am running the latest version of OSX 10.3 on a Titanium PB 667 Mhz - the battery is already pretty weak and the power adapter doesn't always charge. Yesterday, being plugged in, i got the message that i was now running on reserve battery power. being used to that, i moved around the cables from the power adapter a bit and turned the plug at the powerbook, which usually helps. All of a sudden, the computer just turned off without first going to sleep, which is normally the case when the battery gets too weak.

I could restart and all after making sure that the PB was plugged in properly again, but then i realized that safari and mail would not start up anymore (they had been running during the sudden switch-off)

reinstalling safari didnt help.

when i view the package contents and run the Unix executable file for safari (resp. mail), i get the following terminal output:

Safari:

Last login: Thu May 5 15:48:30 on ttyp1
/Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari; exit
Welcome to Darwin!
Vigor13:~ volkerzimmermann$ /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari; exitdyld: /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari truncated or malformed library: /System/Library/Frameworks/WebKit.framework/Versions/A/WebKit (file is empty)
Trace/BPT trap
logout
[Process completed]

Mail:

Last login: Thu May 5 15:49:49 on ttyp1
/Applications/Mail.app/Contents/MacOS/Mail; exit
Welcome to Darwin!
Vigor13:~ volkerzimmermann$ /Applications/Mail.app/Contents/MacOS/Mail; exit
dyld: /Applications/Mail.app/Contents/MacOS/Mail truncated or malformed library: /System/Library/Frameworks/WebKit.framework/Versions/A/WebKit (file is empty)
Trace/BPT trap
logout
[Process completed]



... from this i figure some kind of application library got busted at the moment of the power failure, but sadly i am not smart/knowledgeable enough to fix the apps myself. Losing all my mails would be a nightmare. Can any of you think of a solution to this?

Thanks a lot in Advance!

- Volker

 

[MBHockey]

Problems due to electrical anomalies are usually linked to corruption in the nvram, but the problems i mean are due to electrical spikes, not so sure about power failures.

I'd run Disk Utility to fix the disk permissions, boot into single user mode to run 'fsck', and also try resetting the nvram...

to run FSCK...reboot, and hold down cmd+S while the computer is booting.

At the prompt type 'fsck -y' without the quotes (or 'fsck-yf' if your file system is journaled)

If it finds errors the first time, then run it again. Keep running it until all it says on the output is 'the volume xxx appears to be OK'

If that doesn't work, you might have some luck booting into Open Firmware and resetting the nvram.

To accomplish this, reboot, and while the machine is booting (before grey screen with the progress circle thingy appears) hold down cmd+option+O+F
until you are booted into open firmware, which looks like a white screen, with dark text, and a prompt.

at the prompt type:

reset-nvram

then hit enter
then to restart the computer and save the changes, type:

reset-all

 

[rabatjoie]

Hi MBHockey,

thanks for the advice - but I tried the things you listed and there has been no change to the situation. Fixed a heap of permissions, disk seemed to be OK according to FSCK, and reset the nvram.

Looking at the terminal output again it seems to me that both applications try to access the same library file in the system folder which is called "webkit". Do you (or does anyone else) know how i can perhaps replace the file? Is stuff like this downloadable?

Thanks again,

Volker