The application Finder.app can't be opened.

Brilliant! It worked, no rebooting... now if only there was a real fix for this issue.

My home server (Snow Leopard 10.6.3) was running nicely along, with three internal disks and a 10 TB drobo S (direct connect) for backups.

In a fit of energy sanity I turned on the "Put hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" in the Energy Saver preference panel.

I experienced the dreaded "The application Finder.app can't be opened. -10810" error soon thereafter.

I turned the energy saver option off again, and the server has been well-behaved since then (20 hours, now).

*Hypothesis about the cause*: That the Finder is intolerant of disks that are slow spinning up after being put to sleep by the energy saver, and freaks. The Drobo is known to be a slow riser when awakened.

I'm running SL 10.6.4, and I just got the spinning beachball of death, followed by the dreaded "The application Finder.app can't be opened" message, and the number -10810. All my desktop icons are gone.

Apple, for crying out loud, **PLEASE** get this fixed! How many years does it take to fix this?

(This never happened with Tiger).

I just got the error again here on 10.6.4 after hoping it was resolved. I don't remember if it was in this thread, but another user posted this Terminal command to at least restore temporary usage of the computer: "/System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/MacOS/Finder &" (Include the & sign but not the quotes)

This command allows Finder to restart, but external drive access will freeze it up again and a full restart probably won't work. It just allows "normal" computer usage until you have a chance to shut everything down.

Someone please help - I'm tearing my hair out!

I just installed a brand new XServe and immediately installed all the software updates, incl. 10.6.4, etc. Also, there's a new LaCie 12Big 12TB RAID installed and updated. I always restart everything afterwards too, and repeat the process until no more available updates show up. All seemed to test and run OK, to begin with...

Then, I started copying over the 6TB of jobs data, from our old server & Apple RAID to the new Xserve & LaCie RAID (via a direct FireWire link between the two servers).

As the copying should take most of the weekend to complete, I started it and left the office for the w/e, with about 100GB already copied over by the time I left. I work mostly from home and control the server via a VNC viewer, but of course can't do hard restarts (which is compounding the problem bigtime for me).

When I got home and connected in, the copying had hung at about 150GB, on the old and new servers. Couldn't cleanly stop the copying on either machine. So, I 'relaunched' the Finder on the new server. Oh dear, oh dear 😟 ....

Attempting to re-open the finder now results in the -10810 error, "The application Finder can't be opened". I daren't attempt a Restart from home because if it does hang the machine, I've no way of reconnecting until someone presses the power button in London (on Monday, and not straightforward at that either!).

By trawling through this thread and trying just about everything suggested, I still can't get the Finder back, after hours of trying.

So, my first problem is how to get the server to restart either the Finder or itself, from my remote connection.

I can access the Apple menu (if I first open Terminal, which brings up its menu bar, including the Apple). I can also run Terminal commands (and frequently do).

Would a Restart issued from either the Apple menu or Terminal get me out of this nightmare, or just lock the server up?

Or, what else can I do (apart from make the long journey to press the button)?

Any help at all would be most appreciated thanks.

Note: Don't know if it's any clue here, but it seems whatever commands or apps I try to run that are disk related don't do anything at all, apart from hang (incl. Disk Utility or diskutil commands). Typing df in Terminal does however show my 'mounted' drives info.

I had an external Toshiba drive connected via USB at the time, though had been copying files to/from that without issue before this problem arose, and it wasn't being accessed at the time Finder disappeared. Anyway, I was able to unmount that drive with the umount command, but it's apparently made no difference to the current situation.

Message was edited by: TestBeforeSelling

Same error when I save from Firefox to and SMB share. Can't even open the terminal - have to reboot.

Not impressed.

I've had my Mac with SL for about six months now, have been using it with two WD drives and i don't use time machine. As of yesterday i've had the famous 10810 which makes my computer very unstable and sometimes it even crashes. I've been using it with these two harddrives from the beginning so i don't get why this problem has occured after six months.

This is not why I bought a Mac. I come here and read that this problem was already known last year and it still isn't fixed?! I've tried several things now... deleting some files from the library.. Some commands through the terminal.. Nothing seems to work! Whenever i plug my harddrives in... same problem all over again! This is very frustrating...

I have been experiencing this problem since upgrading to SL about a month after it was released. After waiting almost a year for a fix, and near daily forced reboots, I have finally downgraded to Leopard on my Mac Pro.

I can restart the Finder in terminal using the command:
/System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/MacOS/Finder &

But this is such a kludge-- I can get my work done but the machine can't reboot/restart/shut down properly. It has to be forced into shutdown by holding the power button.

SL was released almost a year ago and looking at the number of postings on this particular problem, the Finder bug appears to have been uncovered soon thereafter. I'll consider going back to SL when this problem is really fixed.

These stories sound familiar... My finder locks up, I force close, try to relaunch. Error.

Up until today I have been rebooting my computer a couple times a day........ This takes (at least) a couple minutes each time because of a vmware networking bug (?). At any rate, it's slow.

So today I finally got fed up with it and did some more digging. It seems OSX is just like all other nix OSes and you can just restart the windowserver. This isn't perfect but it at least saves me time.

Just put the following in a terminal:

sudo killall -HUP WindowServer

Details: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071121154033749

Few seconds. Much better, but still annoying. Fix the problem apple.

my problems with error 10810 only happen after my mac has slept while connected to a samba share on a local windows vista pc, but do not happen with samba shares on a NAS WD worldbook or a ubuntu box on their own, unless the vista drive has started a domino effect and then sometimes the other drives cant be accessed either.

in short, SL didnt have these issues before i connected it to the vista drive. the vista pc was there on the lan, but i just hadnt connected to it with finder. it also didnt happen with XP / 10.4/10.5

i think it also needs for the vista drive to have spun down, even if the vista pc itself hasnt gone to sleep, which seems to confirm the point about SL finder not liking drives which are slow to wake. it happens to both the pc's internal drive(toshiba equium laptop), and a WD Elements usb drive attached to it.

i dont think the osx 10.6 updates are connected to my issues, as i recently did a clean reinstall of snow leopard and have accepted every update as it came. also, i dont use Time Machine. it just seems to be that certain drives shared under samba are not well handled by SL finder.

i tried -
At the Terminal $ prompt type "/System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/MacOS/Finder &" without quotes
(this just launches another finder window in addition to the bad one)
and
"mount" command at the Terminal $ prompt
(this just lists mounted drives but doesnt solve my problem)

"Relaunching" finder from the Dock just brings down the 10810 error and eventually freezes the whole macbook to a hard reboot.

what does seem to work is, if my finder is still responsive but cant open files from the vista drive , i can wake the vista drive via remote desktop control (eg via TeamViewer or VNC) and then finder recovers.
OR
if my finder has stopped responding, then i can force quit it via Activity Monitor, and finder then relaunches properly, and all is ok.... until the next time.

sorry for the long post. hope it helps.

ps. Please Apple, could you put down the iphone/ipad for just a little while and fix this for us mac users?

*POTENTIAL SOLUTION!*

I have had a very similar issue to most of the posters here:
The Finder randomly crashes / freezes. It seems to be related to when my external drive is connected. It occurs randomly and inconsistently. Sometimes it will happen when waking from sleep (but not always).

When it happens, I cannot relaunch the Finder. it says "The application Finder.app can't be opened. -10810". Other programs I have opened may or may not work at this time.

Restart does not properly reboot the computer - stuck at first white screen before Apple logo shows.

The only solution is to do unplug everything, holding the power button for 10 seconds and zap PRAM 3x. Now reboots normally, but this is obviously not an acceptable solution for me.

I have spoken to two (very helpful) Apple Tech Support agents and we may finally found the solution. This is what we did:

1. Ran Disk Utility to repair permissions and check for any errors - there were no disk errors.
2. Ran Apple Hardware Test from the install disc to check for any errors - there were none. It seems that all my original symptoms above point to a FW800 issue.
3. We deleted the local com.apple.finder.plist, com.apple.diskutility.plist and the com.apple.timemachine.plist.
4. My external drive has FW800, FW400 and USB2 connections. We have connected it to the iMac via USB2.0. So far, no issues! No Finder crashes, the drive does not unmount itself unexpectedly. All is good.

Next I will try the drive via FW400 for a week or so to see if it's still stable.

This may point to a FW800 / Snow Leopard conflict.
I hope Apple is able to resolve this in the next 10.6 patch.

I'm using the latest update (10.6.4) on a new 2.8 quad iMac. Tons of HD space left.

1) Finder is crashed upon login. Opening it gives the dreaded 10810 error.
2) Can't empty the trash or show downloads.
3) Nothing appears on the desktop- HD, DVD, etc. Saving a file to the desktop does not cause it to appear.
4) This has been happening without an external drive attached. (I have one, but it's been unattached for most of this, so the problem doesn't seem to have anything to do with mounting or unmounting drives.)


Attempted solutions.
1) At first I was able to open the finder for a while, and I tried deleting preference files. com.apple.finder.plist, com.apple.TimeMachine.plist, com.apple.DiskUtility.plist

Didn't do anything.

2) I've used Onyx and rebuilt launch services several times. Didn't do anything.

3) I've tried various solutions in Terminal. One that relaunches the Finder only generates error codes. None of them do anything.

4) I tried downloading the combo update for 6.4, but Finder won't open it to install after downloading.

5) I created a dummy Administrator account for testing purposes. Upon logging in the very first time, I tried to open the Finder and was greeted with the 10810 error.

6) This is beginning to affect other things. I have to reboot every 2 hours to be functional. Certain programs (Firefox especially) have started to hang, but other odd things too. After a while, for example, I can't turn on or off AirPort. It's unresponsive to clicking and beachballs. Much of the time I have to hard reboot with the power switch.

Ever since I upgraded to Snow Leopard I have been having the same problems. I started to have seemingly random problems accessing harddisks, primarily but not limited to, my Lacie harddisks over firewire 800.

Now my main 1TB external harddisk actually broke down, and I'm pretty sure it's because of this problem. I can no longer access it on the other non-snow-leopard machines as well.

While I applaud the success of Apple in the mobile domain, I would like to insist, similarly to some other commenters, that Apple assigns appropriate 'love' to Mac OS X and start with fixing this very real problem A.S.A.P.

Hi,

yesterday I've connected two of my firewire 400 drives to my macbook pro in a long time. It's the first time I use them with this mac in months, although I used firewire a couple of days ago to connect another hd (but only for a few minutes). The two hds (a very reliable maxtor, wich has served me for years and a "generic assembled" hd, wich has shown no problems so far) are chained together and then connected to the mac using a firewire 400-800 cable. I started to copy varius gbs from the internal hd (I'm doing some long term backup to free up some space. But I still have over 10 GBs on the internal disk, so that's not the problem), everything was incredibly slow (10 minutes to copy 100 mb?!), so I stopped the copy, disconnected everything and tryed again today. Everything was fine, I copied a lot of gbs (over 30, i think), then the copy didn't start for a bunch of files ("preparing the copy"…or something like that). After some time I force quitted the finder, reopening it gave me the -10810 error. Opening it from the Terminal, using the "open" command gave a similar result. A demo of path finder I've installed just hangs after showing some windows. However I can launch the finder normally using the command

/System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/MacOS/Finder

in the terminal.
Now the finder doesn't show all but one of the external hds' partitions and even this one isn't shown on the desktop, just in the Computer's window, and can't be opened. Disk Utility hands on start, after showing one of the external partition (not that one!). Using diskutil shows that the partitions are still mounted, but they can't be ejected.

Everything else (safary, garageband, itunes, audacity, mail, terminal, remote desktop, ical…) works fine.

I'm going to reboot now let's see what happens…

One hd is gone and the other doesn't feel very well. 😟

I tried rebooting, the system hang showing only the desktop. I used ssh to reboot from another mac, nothing. I disconnected the firewire cable, the mac rebooted. Upon reboot only one hd showed up. I opened disk utility and checked the internal hd, everything is fine. I shut down the missing hd and turned it on again, it appeared. I checked the externals hd, the former missing one is ok, the other "had to be repaired", however the repair button was grey and i cannot mount it anymore. now it shows up as not recognizable and the system offers to initialize it. On another mac (a G3 with tiger) the result is the same, using the usb connection that that hd has doesn't change a thing. The system just destroyed 200 and more gbs of data. Most of it was the copy of the other disk but now I'm quite unconfident about it.