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Kel Solaar Author

Level 1

5 points

The application Finder.app can't be opened.

I upgraded to Snow Leopard yesterday, and I'm having a lot of troubles, Finde, Time Machine and Disk Utility being the most annoying of them. I don't really know which one of them is making the others unstable / crash but well that's starting to be very irritating, now when I try to start the Finder I get this :

*The application Finder.app can't be opened.*
-10810

Restarting the Computer ( Mac Book Pro Uni ) usually fix that, but it's the second time that it's crashing a 220 go files package copy. I ended up doing it with rsync, the copy is still going on ( it will take a long time ) but I'm left with a Zombie Computer where I can't open a finder, and every Application that use it to open some file is crashing itself.

Is there a way to manually relaunch it ( I don't want to reboot, my computer is stuck backing up a lot of files ) ? I tried Sudo Launch the Finder from /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/MacOS with no luck, any help would be appreciated.

KS

Message was edited by: Kel Solaar

Mac OS X (10.6)

Posted on Aug 30, 2009 12:35 PM

696 replies

Divebus

Level 1

4 points

May 14, 2013 5:36 PM in response to Kel Solaar

This starts it up for me: /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/MacOS/Finder &

pcmason

Level 1

4 points

Jul 31, 2013 5:39 PM in response to Kel Solaar

For this issue I found the following to be the solution.

In the root level of the system volume there should be a symbolic link for the folder /private/tmp.

On some machines this is an actual folder called tmp.

If you startup in single user mode (booting while holding command + S) and delete the /tmp folder and create the symbolic link to /private/tmp it should resolve this issue.

You can tell if it is an actual folder or a symbolic link from the command line by typing "ls -l" no quotation marks.

To create the symbolic link type "ln -s /private/tmp tmp" no quotation marks.

Changed the symbolic links group to what is should be with the following.

"chown -R -P root:wheel /tmp" no quotation marks.

If you need more info just ask.

Dec 9, 2013 10:22 PM in response to Kel Solaar

encountered this problem using a Western Digital MyBook 3TB on my older iMac with Snow Leopard while the WD drive was formatted in OS Extended w/journalling (by my newer MBP, unsure if that is related). i reformatted the drive with the iMac in OS Extended without journalling and now it's been working perfectly on all machines. go figure.

Mar 14, 2014 2:16 PM in response to creationministries

Thank you! That worked. I happened to accidentally spotlight preview a file on a network drive as well.

May 22, 2014 3:56 PM in response to pcmason

pcmason,

I'm having a problem with my MacBook Pro. Lost my applications folder, can't execute Finder, getting the spinning ball constantly. Can only startup in single user mode.

Tried the instructions above but when I entered the chown command I was told /tmp was a read-only file system. Somewhat familiar with unix but not sure why I got that. I did enter "ln -s /private/tmp tmp" after trying to delete /tmp with the rmdir command. Said /tmp was not a dir.

Very frustrated with no applications, no finder, constant spinner.

Can you help?

sketchup

Level 1

4 points

Sep 16, 2016 2:34 PM in response to SantaFe67

There are multiple causes of this, but the only way I've found to restore this is to blow away my ~/Library directory. You do lose your preferences to a lot of applications, but at least you can restore than.

The application Finder.app can't be opened.