Re: A serious error?
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg71903] Re: A serious error?
- From: Andrzej Kozlowski <akoz at mimuw.edu.pl>
- Date: Sun, 3 Dec 2006 06:26:17 -0500 (EST)
- References: <ekrkao$s4g$1@smc.vnet.net> <457197FE.7060101@dordos.net>
Thanks a lot Peter. Yours was the suggestion that set me on the right track! I repaired permissions on my hard disk and Mathematica 5.1 launched with problems. Indeed, it was after all font related, as I had suspected. Among the permissions that were wrong most were in ./Library/Fonts. In fact I used to know that incorrect permissions could cause such problems and I frequently used this method in earlier versions of Mac OS X, but I have never suffered from anything in Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) so I assumed it somehow dealt with this sort of thing by itself. Of course Mathematica reporting "error 16" did not help. If it told me that it could not access something I would have understood the situation at once. Finally, I would like than everyone else who wrote to me to try to help. They all made good suggestions, but it required someone who had had a very similar experience to make the right one. Curious that that person turned out to be a Windows user ;-) Thanks again Peter. Now I can again remove Mathematica 5.0 and use some of my favorite new functions, like Tuples ;) On down side, I have now lost some basis for the argument I have been making to my wife, that I need a new MacBook Pro ;-) Andrzej On 3 Dec 2006, at 00:13, Peter Pein wrote: > Hello Andrzej, > > I've got the same symptoms a few days ago on my Windows 2000 PC. > The system > did not go down properly, so I pressed the reset button after some ten > minutes. Immediatelly after reboot, the screen fonts looked really > ugly and > Mathematica promised to and did crash. > > There have been some folders (including the one containing most of > the fonts) > for which I lost the right to read/execute/write. After resetting the > access-rights, everything worked OK. > > Hope that hekps a bit, > Peter > > Andrzej Kozlowski schrieb: >> 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 >> >> >