My mother has a Mac G5.. So we are not sure what happened but I received a link in a email from her that was obviously spam and was sent to several people..I questioned her on it and she didnt send that link out (I also had another of those spam links in another email from a friend with a pc)

So im not real sure what she did after that..but she did something anyway its like the whole system is on lockdown. she tried to get the newest version of snow leopard and it wont accept it. she only has basic explorer and basic google on there now...she cant download anything or print anything off., no java now..nothing.
She cant even get into her yahoo or gmail accounts now.

she is wanting to figure out which system it it actually using, said she cant access the hard drive or anything..

said it came with a backup of classic 9 and she said she never really wanted to use that but was even trying to locate it to see if she could get it to run..cant find that either..

I asked her if she could wipe the system clean and reinstall everything..is this what she is needing to do?? or is her computer just fried?
any help would be deeply appreciated.

It's not a virus, the spam link has nothing to do with it. There aren't any Mac viruses circulating now, and even the ones that exist don't do this kind of thing.

If you can get Disk Utility to run (inside the Utilities folder, which is inside the Applications folder) you can run Disk First Aid and Repair Permissions and see if that helps.

She'll probably have to wipe the drive and install a fresh operating system, but that's just a guess. Maybe the computer IS fried. You'd need to give us a lot more technical information about what happened, the errors she's getting and anything else that's going wrong, and you'll need to describe it accurately.

In any case, if you reinstall the system, forget Classic OS9. A G5 will run OSX just fine, and OS9 isn't being supported anymore.

Good luck!

She said it is reporting no errors at all.
when she tries to open a application it says "cannot read this document" like there was never a application in there to open.

when she goes to "my mac" where it says what system she is using there is nothing there. no system showing at all.


im thinking this is more of a issue then shes gonna be able to handle on her own and shes gonna have to take it in. I KNOW she messed with it, shes one of those that likes to mess around with technical stuff on her own even though she has no knowledge of what shes messing with .
I think she went in and uninstalled her system and was trying to install and new one and she crashed and burned. haha

thanks :)

Crisis over. my 14 year old fixed her computer. got it updated with the snow leopard she was wanting and is running even better then before so all good :)

Great!

Now, just make sure she keeps a current backup.