Lost ability to soft shutdown/restart

anything I can do to restore my ability to allow me to force a shutdown/restart on my iMac G4 1.25 running Tiger?
Christopher Fugle wrote on :
Does aanyone know of anything I can do to restore my ability to allow me to force a shutdown/restart on my iMac G4 1.25 running Tiger? I lost the ability months ago (the OS kills all apps but sits at a solid colour background,no dock or menu forever). Many thanks for any expertise provided.... Happy New Year
Hans Aberg replied on :

In article 2005123006131716807-cfuglenoreply@redacted.invalid, Christopher Fugle cfuglenoreply@redacted.invalid wrote:

Does aanyone know of anything I can do to restore my ability to allow me to force a shutdown/restart on my iMac G4 1.25 running Tiger? I lost the ability months ago (the OS kills all apps but sits at a solid colour background,no dock or menu forever). Many thanks for any expertise provided....

I know that this behavior does occur if one is throwing away a SCSI hard drive (or shuttig it down) when the Finder is running. So it could be some kind of hardware or driver problem.

But try software solutions, first. Use Terminal and type 'reboot' (see 'man reboot'). Try 'ps -ax' to se if you have some processes that do not shutdown. Then kill them using 'kill -9'. After that, try to to a standard Finder restart.

Christopher Fugle replied on :

On 2005-12-30 06:42:42 -0500, haberg@redacted.invalid (Hans Aberg) said:

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Thanks Hans I shall try this right away. BTW- No SCSI just a plain old iMac G4

matt neuburg replied on :

Christopher Fugle cfuglenoreply@redacted.invalid wrote:

Does aanyone know of anything I can do to restore my ability to allow me to force a shutdown/restart on my iMac G4 1.25 running Tiger? I lost the ability months ago (the OS kills all apps but sits at a solid colour background,no dock or menu forever).

Go into /Library/StartupItems and throw everything away. See if that helps. When I have similar problems it is always due to a bad StartupItems entry. m.

Christopher Fugle replied on :

On 2005-12-30 13:32:16 -0500, matt@redacted.invalid (matt neuburg) said:

Christopher Fugle cfuglenoreply@redacted.invalid wrote:

Does aanyone know of anything I can do to restore my ability to allow me to force a shutdown/restart on my iMac G4 1.25 running Tiger? I lost the ability months ago (the OS kills all apps but sits at a solid colour background,no dock or menu forever).

Go into /Library/StartupItems and throw everything away. See if that helps. When I have similar problems it is always due to a bad StartupItems entry. m.

Good idea Should I create a backup of this folder first? Much appreciated.

matt neuburg replied on :

Christopher Fugle cfuglenoreply@redacted.invalid wrote:

On 2005-12-30 13:32:16 -0500, matt@redacted.invalid (matt neuburg) said:

Christopher Fugle cfuglenoreply@redacted.invalid wrote:

Does aanyone know of anything I can do to restore my ability to allow me to force a shutdown/restart on my iMac G4 1.25 running Tiger? I lost the ability months ago (the OS kills all apps but sits at a solid colour background,no dock or menu forever).

Go into /Library/StartupItems and throw everything away. See if that helps. When I have similar problems it is always due to a bad StartupItems entry. m.

Good idea Should I create a backup of this folder first?

As you like. My view is that if some program is going to create a StartupItems entry it will recreate it when you run the program again. But of course you don't want to do that if this is the program creating the bad StartupItems entry! m.