Rebuilding a working iMac

Ok, perhaps a few of you may have caught my mentioning my iMac was corrupt. One of the directory files was corrupted beyond recovery. DiskWarrior was able to fix what it could, but there was damage beyond its capability. I now face a daunting task - thousands upon thousands of files are on my Macintosh HD in the main directory. It is impossible to view these files because there are so many that the Finder bogs down after around 5000, going up slowly by one file at a time, and a Search counted over 8000 of one type of file alone.

What the fricken frick was I to do? Abandon any idea of searching, select all, drag files into separate folders - Sherlock does not have the ability to search a specific directory, it either searches the entire HD or nothing.

Need Internet access - a MacHome CD from 1999 has self-extracting copies of Internet Explorer 4.5 and Netscape - good, because Stuffit Expander on my machine is not working, and I would not archive it. Software Update returns a very simple error "Software Update cannot run." Thanks.

So I write this as an interesting, ongoing tale from hell. Thank whoever for Boris' blog site and hands that seem to write essays so my brain doesn't have to. First thing - get updated version of Netscape. Fortunately, Preferences are intact, but some Control Panels and Extensions seem to be missing. I have a boot CD of MacOS 9.2.2 made from my original system folder from approximately a year ago - nothing has changed since then. I'll remove all extensions and control panels and replace them with copies from the CD. Macintosh HD now has a Folder with the Quicktime Icon - when DiskWarrior repaired the hard drive, the System Folder was not "blessed" so aparently it gave the Hard Drive a new icon, unless that was part of the corruption, or fixing the corruption.

What a nightmare. I'm just thankful this all works, though. More later… hopefully from IE 5.0.6!

This is part of the long term Archive, originally published on

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