Re: A serious error?
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg71910] Re: [mg71888] A serious error?
- From: Julio Vera <jvera60 at yahoo.co.uk>
- Date: Sun, 3 Dec 2006 06:26:35 -0500 (EST)
Something that came to my mind while reading your post, I´ll share it with you just in case it might be of any use.
Perhaps when you reinstall Mathematica it reinstalls the kernel but not the front-end. If this were the case, and you have some flaw in your hard disk that is affecting the front-end, it would continue to be corrupted.
So, I would check the hard disk for integrity, and then try to reinstall just the front-end.
Julio
Andrzej Kozlowski <akoz at mimuw.edu.pl> 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