Turning off virtual memory borked OS9.1

[xjas]

I was playing some games on my iMac G3. Everything was going fine until I got to Prince of Persia 2, which demanded I turn off virtual memory. I did so, and now it refuses to boot; it gets past the "starting up" screen where it shows all the icons across the bottom, switches to a blue background with a mouse cursor and empty menu bar, and then just sits there. The HDD stops accessing and nothing I do gets past this screen.

This machine has 384MB RAM BTW.

What's gone wrong here? How do I fix this without reinstalling the whole OS?

 

[commodorejohn]

That's interesting. If you boot it without extensions (hold Shift during boot,) does it come up normally? You could try rebuilding the desktop database (hold Option + Command during boot) just to see if that does anything, but if it doesn't even give you the normal Finder menu bar that sounds like something more significant might be screwed up.

If worst comes to worst, reinstalling the OS on a classic Mac is generally a much less painful process than on Windows PCs; you can set it up to keep the old system files around and most everything aside from system extensions and preferences lives in its own directory.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Could be something about the Finder, too. Trashing its Preferences wouldn't hurt to try.

 

[xjas]

Well, it booted with extensions disabled... I tried deleting Finder's preferences and rebuilding the desktop cache but neither thing solved it. So I turned virtual memory back on and it fired right up normally. I do have disk cache and ram disk enabled in the memory preferences (it was configured that way when I got it.)

Here's the screen it gets stuck at with vmem off:


It's a fairly hard lockup too, the mouse cursor stops moving (although the caps lock light on the keyboard still responds to toggling.)

After booting it up with vmem back on, it came up with this error - I've been installing some older (68k-era) games on it which may have put ancient stuff in the Extensions directory. I trashed the offending file & it seems to be fine.



To be honest, now that it's booting normally again I'm not overly inclined to mess with it much. But I would like to know why I can't disable vmem. I was all excited to give Prince 2 a go, as I've never played the high-res Mac version. Everything else I've tried seems to run great on it.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

You're not going to damage much by trying it again. Worst that happens is it still doesn't work. A lot of times debugging these kinds of (what seems to be a) extension conflict just requires a lot of trial and error.

Anyway, that screen that comes up looks like what happens when the Finder won't start for some reason.