How do I restore when Finder is broken?

[pbedouk]

Hi

I have a sad tale, and I hope you can help. My Finder won't launch and the menu bar is absent. I am at 10.5.2, and this started 3 days ago. After reinstalling Leopard twice to no avail, the Apple Care technicians are now saying to start all over again by uninstalling ALL 3rd party applications. This seems like a wild guess and will take me days if not weeks to accomplish. At the end of this I have added a thread I am on with ehMac, who are much more helpful.

Anyway here is my Shirt Pocket question.

Before my initial Leopard upgrade, I purchased SuperDuper and did a full backup to a USB attached external drive. After Leopard had been running fine for a few days, I did a Smart Update. (Should have done a full backup, but I didn't). Is the backup I have usable since the base is 10.4.11 and the Smart Update is 10.5.2?? If the backup I have is usable (to restore only the system files I hope), then how do I do it?



Thread from ehMac:

Thanks for your suggestion, which I tried, but it didn't work. The Apple Care technician (who recommended the same thing) couldn't resolve this either, and recommended reinstalling Leopard.

I have now done that twice, with no success. Here is what I did:

Reinstalled 10.5.0, downloaded and installed the 6 recommended updates (including 10.5.2 combo), and had the exact same problem. Called back Apple Care and the next technician suggested downloading the testing each of the 6 updates individually.

So I reinstalled 10.5.0 and verified that it worked ... it did. the problem with the finder did not appear. I surfed, emailed, launched apps, opened folders to my hearts content.

I then individually downloaded and successfully tested updates to Remote Desktop Client, iLife, Front Row, Quicktime, and iTunes. These all worked fine and the Finder problem did not manifest.

then I downloaded and installed the 10.5.2 combo and to my dismay the Finder problem reappeared. So I called back Apple Care.

The third technician suggested removing all third party applications and trying again. I found this suggestion less than satisfactory to say the least. I have not done this and plan to call again today to see if I can get another tech with a more sensible idea. This sounds like a stab in the dark.

Here is a more complete description of the symptoms.

Finder won't launch. Menu bar not present UNLESS there is an application running. Time machine won't launch. Finder keeps trying to start, but fails. I think this all started after I was exploring time machine. To my knowledge I didn't run time machine.

Would you have another suggestion??
__________________

[dnanian]

You can't really just restore Finder and expect it to work. I think I'd suggest an archive-and-install of 10.5.0, updating to 10.5.1 and not 10.5.2 if that's where your issue seems to be...

[pbedouk]

thanks for your quick reply on a Sunday afternnon! ... i'll try that. If I have to erase my disk and start all over at some point, what can I recover from my supersuper backup?

[dnanian]

If you need to do that, I'd migrate from the backup when it prompts you to "copy from another Mac".

[pbedouk]

Hi .. I got the OS back to 10.5.1 and it worked fine. Then I did a full SD backup to my USB connected eternal drive and (silly me) tried to upgrade to 10.5.2 again. Same problem recurred. So now I have a base system on the backup drive that works and is reasonably current. So back to my original question, how do I restore from that backup when the finder doesn't work? Sorry I don't understand the restore process, never having done it and not really understanding what is going on under the covers.

Thanks

Peter.

[dnanian]

Start up from the backup and do a "Backup - all files" (or use the "Restore..." script if you're side-by-side with a Time Machine volume) from the backup back to the internal drive.