FCP5 crashes on Startup

[Craig Terott]

Originally Posted by Boyd Ostroff

Do you have a firewire drive as large as your internal startup disk? If so then use a utility program to clone the internal drive to the firewire drive as a backup. Then reformat the internal drive and reinstall Tiger, applying all the updates. You can then use the migration assistant to move all your files and reinstall FCP. That should put your system in a known state.

But before going to all that trouble, you might try booting from the cloned external drive for the hell of it and see if FCP works on that drive for some odd reason?

Thinking a little about what you said... "Reinstalled OS Tiger(and all updates)", I wonder if one of the updates is the source of your problem?

Answer to your first question is no.

I guess if I'm going to clone a drive - it probably would clone the problem. My next step is a complete rebuild. If that doesn't work I may have a G5 for sale.

[Ron Pfister]

Craig, a few more words of advice (hopefully) before you embark on your rebuild:

- After backing up all essential files, insert your OS install CD and shut down
- Disconnect any third-party USB and FireWire peripherals
- Boot-up with the OS install CD, choose your language, then launch Disk Utilit from the Utilities menu
- Re-format your drive, writing zeroes over it (Erase-tab). This is the ONLY way to get rid of bad blocks on ATA/S-ATA drives, since you can't do a software-based low-level format. The IDE will map the bad blocks out when completely re-writing the disk, which is what writing zeroes does. If you want a partition scheme with more than one partition, you need to use the Erase function first (w/ zeroes). Once complete, you can re-partition as needed in the Partition-tab.
- Once done, re-boot and do all the resets (P-RAM, Open Firmware, PMU) as mentioned before. After this, there's absolutely nothing left on your machine from the previous installation.
- Then install the OS

Good luck!

HTH,

Ron

[Boyd Ostroff]

Originally Posted by Craig Terott

Answer to your first question is no. I guess if I'm going to clone a drive - it probably would clone the problem.

You really should have a drive large enough to do a full backup. Obviously, cloning the drive will copy any problem files but the point is that you would have a full backup of everything that could be used to extract anything you needed. Others are telling you basically the same thing however, you need to completely erase the internal drive and re-install everything "clean."

[Ron Pfister]

Craig, any news on your battle front?

[Craig Terott]

Originally Posted by Ron Pfister

Craig, any news on your battle front?

Thanks everyone for your help.

Just when I was about to hang myself with a disk reformat and rebuild a member on another forum recommended I CREATE A NEW USER ACCOUNT (w/admin privilages of course). Final Cut launched first try under the new account. I'm stupefied.

[Ron Pfister]

Originally Posted by Craig Terott

I CREATE A NEW USER ACCOUNT (w/admin privilages of course). Final Cut launched first try under the new account. I'm stupefied.

A clear sign of a corrupt preference file (these are all user-based). If you can't find the culprit, the only way around it is a clean-install...

HTH,

Ron

[Ron Pfister]

Craig: since you couldn't get rid of the problem in the original user account, you may not have deleted all the FCP-prefs. You may want to try again, deleting the following files in ~/Library/Preferences in your old user account: com.apple.FinalCutPro.plist and the folder 'Final Cut Pro User Data'. Warning: deleting the latter also rids you of all your custom settings you may have created!

[Craig Terott]

Originally Posted by Ron Pfister

Craig: since you couldn't get rid of the problem in the original user account, you may not have deleted all the FCP-prefs. You may want to try again, deleting the following files in ~/Library/Preferences in your old user account: com.apple.FinalCutPro.plist and the folder 'Final Cut Pro User Data'. Warning: deleting the latter also rids you of all your custom settings you may have created!

You were right - there must have been a preference file that I neglected to delete... even though I would swear to it that I deleted every one that had Final Cut or Final Cut Studio in it... multiple times! I can't explain it.

This little program kills all Final Cut 5 prefs with one click.

http://pistolerapost2.com/fcprescue/

FC is now running in my original user account.