Nothing personal or life-changing but my iBook was doing all kinds of weird stuff today. Otherwise solid apps wouldn’t run (I kept getting crash reports on EXEC BREAK, whatever that means) and the messages were all about the core libraries being flaky. Eeep!
I had resigned myself to a format and reinstall at worst, but I noticed that logging in as root didn’t manifest the same problems. If I switched to my account, the Finder wouldn’t even load: just up and down, over and over again.
So I ended up taking a backup (16 Gb worth) of my home, then moving the ~/Library/Preferences directory aside and rebuilding it.
Simply logging in starts the process. I ended up with
- ~/Library/Preferences
- ~/Library/Preferences.old
- ~/Library/Preferences.good
The first and last were identical, once I set a few simple preferences that I felt wouldn’t break anything. I copied a few trustworthy items from .old to ~/Library/Preferences, then I simply copied .good once I had things reasonably solid.
Then I copied the contents of ~/Library/Preferences over the contents of .old, then copied it all back, so I could both overwrites bad files with good ones and then repopulate my prefs for apps I didn’t want to do one at a time.
So far (knock, knock) so good.