Disappearing mouse cursor in Jaguar

[celeborn]

My mom's had trouble already a couple of times on her eMac (10.2.3) with the mouse cursor disappearing entirely. The mouse still works (ie. you can move it around and click on things), but it's invisible. I have a suspicion the problem is linked to Internet Explorer, as apart from Mail it's the only app she uses. I also vaguely remember this happening to me once while using IE. However, quitting IE didn't solve the problem - logging out and logging in again did, though.

Anyone had similar trouble? I would (and my mother would) very much like to find out what could be causing this...

 

[bobw]

Run fsck on the disk;

To run fsck, you first need to start up your Mac in single-user mode. Here's how:

1. Restart your Mac.

2. Immediately press and hold the Command and "S" keys.

You'll see a bunch of text begin scrolling on your screen. In a few more seconds, you'll see the Unix command line prompt (#).

Congratulations.You're now in single-user mode. I bet you've never seen your Mac screen look like that before. (I wish I could show you a screen shot of it, but as far as I can tell, it's not possible. And photos of it are ugly.)

Now that you're at the # prompt, here's how to run fsck:

1. Type: "fsck -y" (that's fsck-space-minus-y).

2. Press Return.

The fsck utility will blast some text onto your screen. If there's damage to your disk, you'll see a message that says:

***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****

If you see this message--and this is extremely important--repeat Steps 1 and 2 again and again until that message no longer appears. It is normal to have to run fsck more than once -- the first run's repairs often uncover additional problems..

When fsck finally reports that no problems were found, and the # prompt reappears:

3. Type: "reboot" to restart,

or type "exit" to start up without rebooting.

4. Press Return.

Your Mac should proceed to start up normally to the login window or the Finder.

 

[celeborn]

Hmm, I'll do that when I'm at my parents' place next time, but could you please explain why you think this disappearing mouse cursor problem would be linked to hard disk trouble.

And to respond to this: "I bet you've never seen your Mac screen look like that before." - I have indeed. Although I've booted into Single User Mode only once on my iMac, I've had my share of cryptic mess installing/running Yellow Dog Linux. Waste of time though, as I couldn't see any benefit in using Linux as opposed to OS X.