Re: A serious error?
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg71898] Re: A serious error?
- From: Andrzej Kozlowski <akoz at mimuw.edu.pl>
- Date: Sun, 3 Dec 2006 06:26:12 -0500 (EST)
- References: <015CD67D-0D4B-407F-960D-8D53BBCA8710@mimuw.edu.pl>
I have now checked that Mathematica 5.0 works fine with the same start-up disk. However, Mathematica 5.1, whether located on the internal hard disk or on an external one, crashes on start-up. Andrzej Kozlowski On 2 Dec 2006, at 17:22, Andrzej Kozlowski wrote: > I have just encountered a puzzling problem with my Mathematica 5.1 > for Mac OS X. It's probably an issue for technical support, but > just in case someone has encountered it before (and known the > answer) I have decided to post it here. (Actually, I am not even > sure this is really a Mathematica issue rather than a Mac OS X > issue issue). > My Mathematica 5.1 was working fine this morning, but then for some > reason I restarted the computer and on next launch the following > message appeared: > > A serious error has occured while Mathematica was starting up. > Mathematica will probably not function properly until this problem > is resolved. You may choose to continue anyway, but Mathematica may > crash or exit without warning. > > The installation Mathematica may be corrupted. Contact technical > support or visti hhtp://www.wolfram.com for more information. Error > code: 16. > > I clicked "Continue Anyway" and Mathematica crashed as promised. I > then immediately re-installed Mathematica from a back-up disk and > re-started. Exactly the same thing occured. So corrupted > installation does not seem to be the problem. I decided to check if > the problem lies in my Home directory. I created a completely new > user, logged in as the freshly created user and tried launching > Mathematica. The same message, the same crash. > I then booted form an external hard disk, containing a back up of > most things on my hard disk. I launched the copy of Mathematica 5.1 > on my internal hard drive (the same one that was crashing on > startup) . It launched and worked without a problem. So, it seems > that something is indeed wrong with the system software on the > internal drive. What could it be? The only thing that came to my > mind was some font corruption, so I replaced all the fonts in my > internal hard drive by those in the external one, but to no effect. > > I have also confirmed that the problem is only with the FrontEnd; > if I launch the Kernel from the command line it works fine. Just in > case I tried Mathematica 4.2 on the same system: it also works fine. > > At the moment it looks like I will have to replace the contents of > my internal hard disk with my external one. This is going to be > time consuming and I might even loose something, because the two > disks have not been kept not synchronized. So I consider this as a > last resort. Apart of that, however, I would like to solve this > puzzle. What could it be, that seems to affect only the Front End > of Mathematica 5.1, and does not lie within the application package > itself (since that works fine when used with a different startup > disk), nor in the User directory, and does not seem to be caused by > a corrupted font? > > Andrzej Kozlowski > >