More Mysterious Leopard Failures

So this error goes back a few weeks- I am late in posting but I dont think it matters.

I had upgraded a 1.25GHz PowerPC Mac to 10.5.5. Leopard and all went well for a while.

Then for some reason it hung at startup.

When I checked the console, I saw this:

ERROR 1 [Login1 resetDevicePermissions] | CGSCopySessionList returned NULL
_RegisterApplication() FAILED to establish the default connection to the WindowServer

So that’s why it wouldnt start! I mean really, you wouldn’t start if you couldn’t establish the default connection to the WindowServer either.

Anyways I was stumped. This new-fangled (to me) Leopard thingy had me by the short and curlies. Not much found via web searching. So I:

• Tried fsck
• Deleted kernelcaches
• Deleted launchservices cache

All to no avail. Then I found a clue somewhere on discussions.apple.com, suggesting it was a permissions problem that might be solved by Repairing Permissions.

That didn’t work either. But by trying that I did discover that the file

com.apple.windowserver.plist

was completely missing! That’s odd. Why doesn’t OSX check for this and just create a new one?

In any case what I had to do was to

Boot up from another drive (my trusty external firewire or the other internal drive) and copy that file from the Leopard installer DVD into the correct Preferences folder, and reboot.

Life is Good!

~ by connectionfailure on 3 December, 2008.