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A fix for a rapidly and repeatedly crashing Finder Desktop
This happened to me a few hours ago, and I didn't find anything useful when I searched this site for an answer, so I thought I'd share my trouble and fix.

During some heavy work on my PowerBook, I moved some files to my desktop to organize what I was working on, then moved to clean up the clutter in my files I'd made. A few minutes later, the Finder crashed and restarted, then crashed again and restarted, in rapid-fire succession. Finder never stayed up long enough to do anything useful like examine for corrupt files, only long enough to finish starting up. Repeated reboots did nothing, and I could run every other program fine.

The solution (after many hours of research and data backup) was to remove all the files from the Desktop folder in my User account. I had to do this by booting my PowerBook in FireWire target disk mode and using the other computer to delete the files (after making backups first, of course). This should help someone else who can't figure out what to do since the Finder won't stay up long enough to do anything useful.

[robg adds: If you don't have a second machine available, there are a couple of alternatives which should also work. If you have another admin user, you could do a hard restart and login as the other admin user, then use the Terminal to remove (or move) the primary user's desktop files. Alternatively, you should also be able to boot in single user mode (Command-S at startup) and work with the troublesome user files in that mode. However, I haven't tested either of these methods...]
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A fix for a rapidly and repeatedly crashing Finder | 4 comments | Create New Account
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A fix for a rapidly and repeatedly crashing Finder
Authored by: donaciano on Jun 29, '04 12:16:35PM

I actually had this same problem 2 weeks ago, but I managed to narrow down the cause a little bit more. My corrupted file was not on the desktop but in a subfolder far enough down in columns view that it had to be scrolled down to be seen. If the finder window was scrolled to where it would begin to show it would immediately crash the Finder which would restart. Fortunately the window position would be reset to the top of the column and I could do it again if I wanted or not. ;-) Copying the file via command-line resulted in a Resource-less copy of it which worked fine once it was given the right extension. I believe copying the Resource-less file over the original did NOT fix it, the cp command can't erase or change any resc I believe. The only way to fix it was either to delete the file vi command-line and then move the resc-free one back where it was, or to create a completely new folder and after moving the clean version of the file over I was able to use the FInder to move the rest.

I did at one point turn the folder view into Icons at which point I had a rebooting finder like the original hint mentioned. Not sure how I got out of that one, but it was annoying. :-)

I wish I had more experience with Mac resource forks but I'm an OS X switcher so a bit lacking in that dept, plus I needed the file and couldn't really play around with it. OH! The reason I noticed the corrupted file in the first place is that CCC complained that it couldn't be copied. That's what alerted me.

Panther on an iBook 640MB, 10.3.4 up to date.
-Don.



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A fix for a rapidly and repeatedly crashing Finder
Authored by: drubert on Jul 03, '04 01:27:55AM

Thank you for posting - I've been searching everywhere and not finding much.
Unfortunately - the posted solutions are not helping me much.

Here is what I have done.
I have a second machine that I can use to connect to my mucked up machine.
I've removed all files from the desktop.
I had ton's of stuff in the .trash --- I deleted all those.
I booted in single user and ran fsck.
This did show two messages that were similar just with different file#s.
Overlapped extent allocation (file 299234d)
I have no idea what that means - or if it is related.

Here is what is common. (perhaps to find the cause)
I recently did move a large # of files onto the desktop (mame ROMS)

I'm still down!
Any other ideas?



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A fix for a rapidly and repeatedly crashing Finder
Authored by: Cantus on Jun 30, '04 07:45:29PM

Agh! I wish I had known about this back then when it happened to me.

I was working in Word and dragged some files to the Desktop, and then the Finder started crashing and crashing.

I had to completely reinstall the system! This was in 10.1.4, I believe.

Incredible Apple still hasn't fixed it.

The Finder is the worst Mac OS X application.



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A fix for a rapidly and repeatedly crashing Finder
Authored by: wsdr on Jul 05, '04 10:50:43PM

I had a similar problem on a client's laptop. The culprit in this case was the .DS_Store file in the Desktop folder; nuked that and the problem went away.



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