i’ve been pretty frusterated with the frequency of my browsers crashing in panther. i’ve narrowed it down to the flash plugin in the last few months, and submitted a bug to apple.
today i stumbled on the fix. if your mac is setup with UFS formatted file system (it probably is) and your disk name is “/”, you’re going to see this bug. you’re also going to have some problems with windows media player saying “the specified stream type is not recognized”.
rename your disk to something other than / and you’ll be good to go. i’ve not found an existing apple bug report for this, so you may see one shortly on their support site if they ever read my bugreport.
update: this is true on Mac OS Extended (Journaled) file systems as well.
Comments (7)
A Mac volume is not likely to be formatted as UFS. It is likely to be HFS+ with journaling.
Correct, my mistake. It looks like it’s broken on HFS+ partitions, too.
So I should change my mount point or the name of the hard drive?
Toc: Just the name of the hard drive.
Thanks, I have been having that problem.
For the love of Ritchie, WHY would you name a volume “/”???? That’s not just asking for trouble, that’s demanding it. Come on now, putting / and : in filenames is a big no-no. That’s why the Finder and Save dialog put up a fight if you try to. Rename your disk to something that doesn’t already have a reserved meaning. And while you’re at it, the following are probably out too:
?*!\|>< &:Hm. Append <, :, and &, they got eaten.