Seventhfury Studios Blog

This is a continuation of the Mac Issues series of posts, you can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

I was having a problem with the Mail app on my Macbook Pro. The problem was that Mail wasn’t working at all, and I had to force quit every time I opened it. When the app would launch, the viewer window wouldn’t launch with it. I knew all of my information was correct with my SMTP setup, as it was showing I had a strong connection to my account, so I knew it had to be something with the install.

After checking thoroughly on the internet, I called up Apple support and found out that there is a bug with the newest version of Leopard (10.5.6) for anyone upgrading from Tiger. What happens is that the Mail program installs incorrectly for some reason, so here’s what you have to do if you’re having the same problem:

Close all running applications, then go into your ~User/Library/Mail/ directory and move everything with a white paper icon temporarily to your desktop, leaving all files with folder icons in the directory. Restart your computer and then open Mail and you should be at the “Import Your Messages” screen. Go through this section and when you’re done Mail should open up and be working.

Update: Once you can confirm that Mail is working and you are able to send and receive messages, you can delete the white paper icons from your computer.

I’m not a support guy, but this trick worked like a charm for me. It was so simple that I’m surprised that Apple doesn’t say anything about it on their support site, especially since they know about it. Also, I’d like to just put a disclaimer out to everyone to use at your own risk, this is a trick that worked for me and I can’t be held responsible for anything that might happen if you try it yourself (though I’m sure there isn’t really a risk at all…). 

It’s stressful to have computers that aren’t running correctly when you have so much work to do, so I’m really thankful that after 2 weeks of torture things seem to be on the up and up. Hopefully I won’t have to worry about another hard drive crash any time soon, but if it happens I know that I’ve got a Time Machine on my side.

So ends the saga “Mac Issues”, at least I hope.

 I recently purchased Max OS X Leopard for both of my Macs, I have a G4 PowerMac and a Macbook Pro. A couple of weeks back, one of the hard drives in my G4 PowerMac crashed, but luckily I was able to recover the data using DiskWarrior, which was amazing. 

Needless to say, I was scared of losing some of my valuable files and information. 

After running for eight days straight, DiskWarrior allowed me to pull all of my info from the crashed hard drive and then I buried the thing in the backyard. R.I.P.

My first thought after all of this happened was that I should have been using Leopard’s Time Machine feature to constantly back up my files, so I went down to the Apple store and grabbed a Family Pack to put on my machines. I also grabbed a 1TB FreeAgent XTreme from Best Buy, which has a Firewire 400 port and is pretty rad. 

I got home and set everything up, installed Leopard on both machines, and all was good in the world. Or so I thought. 

Although most everything went well with the update, I soon realized there were a couple of things that were very wrong, one on each computer. I noticed the error on my G4 first, as I was trying to reinstall all of my applications to get back up and running. The problem is that my disc drive wasn’t mounting any discs that I was putting in, so after much searching online and many tests and upgrades of firmware I realized that the poor thing was probably shot from running DiskWarrior for 8 days as well as installing the new OS X.

I needed to get up and running as soon as I could and I didn’t have the car at home that day (wife had it). So, what other options did I have? I did some searching on the net and found something that saved my sanity that day: Macworld’s article on how to borrow an optical drive from another Mac using a Firewire cable. Using this method, I was able to install my entire system again using my MacBook Pro’s optical drive as the source of the install. This was especially helpful in helping me get my Adobe Creative Suite back up and running, because by golly I had work to do!

So how did I get my optical drive back up and running in my G4 PowerMac? Read Mac Issues, Part 2: Installing a New Optical Drive in a G4 PowerMac.