What Happened!

Hi, John.

You wrote:

"I have tried to run disk warrior, and it tells me that I have 20 overlapped files, and it lists them, when I go to find them in the system library, there not there! "

That indicates serious directory corruption. Have you tried to let DiskWarrior repair this damage? It can take some time. Be sure you are using a Tiger-compatible version of Disk Warrior: Version 3.0.3 for PPC-based Macs, Version 4 for PPC- and Intel-based Macs.

The problem you face with this issue is that overlapped files mean corrupted files: the space occupied by two or more files is overlapping, meaning sme or all of the overlapped files may be corrupted due to overwriting. You may need to reinstall Mac OS X, but you also may have personal data that has been corrupted. Hopefully, you have backups.

There can be a variety of causes for such directory corruptiont: see my "Data corruption and loss: causes and avoidance" FAQ for a discussion of this subject.

Good luck!

😉 Dr. Smoke
Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X

---
Note: The information provided in the link(s) above is freely available. However, because I own The X Lab™, a commercial Web site to which some of these links point, the Apple Discussions Terms of Use require I include the following disclosure statement with this post:

I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link.

If DiskWarrior is telling you that some files are overlapped, that means the file system thought they both occupied the same space, at least in part, on the hard drive. Which means that at least one of them is undoubtedly trashed and unrecoverable, and possibly both are.

If these files are in the root-level System folder, that means your system is corrupt and needs to be reinstalled. I wouldn't even try an Archive & Install, since there's a lot of potential for other corrupt files, including settings files that would be kept after such an installation and might cause more problems. If you have backed up your data recently, my advice in this situation would be to completely reformat the hard drive, reinstall the OS from scratch, get all the settings back the way you had them and then put your data back on.

If you don't have a backup (and now you have learned the value of one), you need to get your hard drive backed up immediately, if that is possible given that it is damaged and the system is on the fritz. This is a difficult task at best in your situation, but if you can keep it stable long enough to back up to an external hard drive or burn a DVD or CD, you'll be much happier in the long run. And in the future, I'm sure you'll be sure to keep regular backups!