My system (Leopard) has gone berserk

[MamaMoose]

My MacBook Pro running under OS 10.5.2 has gone bonkers. In trying to get my external drives to mount or unmount, Disk Utilities hangs! When a open DU, I get the spinning color pinwheel of purgatory. After 5 minutes of this, I have to Force Quit DU. So I cannot access all my external drives nor my internal drive. However, About This Mac shows all external (FireWire 800) and my internal SATA drive? One drive does show up on the desk top - the drive that holds Time Machine. However, when I try to back up using Time Machine, it quits due to some sort of unspecified error

A new problem has also occurred - some of the icons on the desktop show a semitransparent, very light gray for the image. I have no idea where in the heck this came from.

Also, when I try to open the Application folder, the spinning color pinwheel also shows up and I never can get the Apps folder to open. I can't even open my boot drive to see its contents without the pinwheel.

All this occurs even if I reboot.

So, for the second time I am going to start up using DiskWarrior DVD (it takes 12 minutes to open) and try to repair my boot drive. The only good news is my boot volume is working, sort of an i have not lost any day or apps. Also, I was able to backup using a USB 2.0 mobile drive that I use when I travel. It is very slow and is powered off of two separate USB 2 buses.

Since LaCie is here in the Portland area, I plan to take all four in to be checked out at a local repair center (The Portland Mac Store).

I still haven't tried using the Terminal. That will be the next thing to do. I am confused as to the name of the drive. According to About This Mac, the FW drives are labeled disk 1, disk2, disk3, and disk 4. The internal drive is disk0. I will use these names and hopefully that will work.

I am not seeking any answers but just bitchin.

MamaMoose

[Paddy]

Tom, have you started up from your install disk and run Disk Utility from there? I strongly urge you to do this before doing anything else. Sounds like you may have disk corruption there somewhere or some sort of permissions screw-up.

If that doesn't work, then try re-installing Leopard. I don't think you need to pay someone to get you out of this quite yet... If you are confident that your backups are complete, I'd do an erase and install - otherwise do an archive and install.

Of course, I'm not convinced of the integrity of your backups on the LaCie drive at this point - but the USB backup may be fine. And you will probably not want to replace anything system-related from the backups if you do reinstall the system.

[MamaMoose]

I finally solved my problem. I had 4 FireWire 800 drives daisy chained. One of them apparently failed dragging down the entire chain and screwing up the Finder. The latter had grayed out icons and inability to perform any Finder task. Worst of all was that Disk Utility would not open so I could not deal with any of the external drives.When I removed the entire chain from the FW 800 port and rand DiskWarrior, everything started to behave!

Now, I am transferring everything over to the new Mac Pro using Migration Assistant. Well se how that works as I anticipate some problems.

MamaMoose