Lost ability to soft shutdown/restart

Does aanyone know of anything I can do to restore my ability to allow me to force a shutdown/restart on my iMac G4 1.25 running Tiger? I lost the ability months ago (the OS kills all apps but sits at a solid colour background,no dock or menu forever).
Many thanks for any expertise provided....
Happy New Year

Previously, Christopher Fugle wrote:

Does aanyone know of anything I can do to restore my ability to allow me to force a shutdown/restart on my iMac G4 1.25 running Tiger? I lost the ability months ago (the OS kills all apps but sits at a solid colour background,no dock or menu forever).
Many thanks for any expertise provided....

I know that this behavior does occur if one is throwing away a SCSI hard drive (or shuttig it down) when the Finder is running. So it could be some kind of hardware or driver problem.

But try software solutions, first. Use Terminal and type 'reboot' (see 'man reboot'). Try 'ps -ax' to se if you have some processes that do not shutdown. Then kill them using 'kill -9'. After that, try to to a standard Finder restart.

On 2005-12-30 06:42:42 -0500, Hans Aberg said:

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Thanks Hans
I shall try this right away. BTW- No SCSI just a plain old iMac G4

Christopher Fugle wrote:

Does aanyone know of anything I can do to restore my ability to allow me to force a shutdown/restart on my iMac G4 1.25 running Tiger? I lost the ability months ago (the OS kills all apps but sits at a solid colour background,no dock or menu forever).

Go into /Library/StartupItems and throw everything away. See if that helps. When I have similar problems it is always due to a bad StartupItems entry. m.

On 2005-12-30 13:32:16 -0500, matt neuburg said:

Christopher Fugle wrote:

Does aanyone know of anything I can do to restore my ability to allow me to force a shutdown/restart on my iMac G4 1.25 running Tiger? I lost the ability months ago (the OS kills all apps but sits at a solid colour background,no dock or menu forever).

Go into /Library/StartupItems and throw everything away. See if that helps. When I have similar problems it is always due to a bad StartupItems entry. m.

Good idea
Should I create a backup of this folder first?
Much appreciated.

Christopher Fugle wrote:

On 2005-12-30 13:32:16 -0500, matt neuburg said:

Christopher Fugle wrote:

Does aanyone know of anything I can do to restore my ability to allow me to force a shutdown/restart on my iMac G4 1.25 running Tiger? I lost the ability months ago (the OS kills all apps but sits at a solid colour background,no dock or menu forever).

Go into /Library/StartupItems and throw everything away. See if that helps. When I have similar problems it is always due to a bad StartupItems entry. m.

Good idea
Should I create a backup of this folder first?

As you like. My view is that if some program is going to create a StartupItems entry it will recreate it when you run the program again. But of course you don't want to do that if this is the program creating the bad StartupItems entry! m.