Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

Mediaman_12 · Jul 11, 2003, 03:37 AM

Help! Yesterday when I shut down the Finder crashed, everything else closed (other apps, the Dock, etc) it got to the 'blue screen' part and stopped. The pointer stayed, the little grayscale 'count down' clock didn't appear, I hit the restart button and pressed the power button to force it to turn it off, and went to bed. I started up this morning, it got past the 'gray Apple' screen, then on the blue screen, it stops. No 'Welcome to Macintosh bar' just flat blue and the pointer (that moves). I have ran DiskWarior, Drive 10 and the disk tool that's on the install (10.2) CD (all did some repairs, and I repaired the permissions). I did an 'archive install' with my 10.2 CD's, no change. Has anyone got any ideas on what to do before I buy a extra HD copy over all my stuff reformat and do a clean install. (70GB=hours of copying)

reader50 · Jul 11, 2003, 04:01 AM

What are your system specs, hard drive make and age?

I always partition, or have a 2nd HD ready for something like this, boot from the spare partition and be fully running instantly. Then take my time to repair the problem partition.

However, I had symptoms somewhat like this one time. OSX could not shut down without help, even if left shutting down overnight. Repair the HD, then repair it again. And again. Repairs would not hold. Sometimes it would boot, other times it would not even mount. It turned out that the factory-supplied WD 10GB 5400 was dying after 2.5 years. I got all data off it to another drive, and got it exchanged. WD was kind enough to replace it with a 10GB 7200.

Mediaman_12 · Jul 11, 2003, 05:36 AM

Originally posted by reader50:
What are your system specs, hard drive make and age?

Doh!
DP Quicksilver (1 GHZ x2)
512MB Ram 2HD's #
Boot drive 80GB Segate OEM
10GB Maxtor (out of old G4)
DVD R/RW drive

It's stock as these specs

I bought it in september last year from a Departmant store (John Lewis for anyone in the UK) as an ex-display (so I have no Idea about it's real age), it was unregistered an came with a full Apple waranty).

Link · Jul 11, 2003, 06:54 AM

Well at least you have a while to claim under warranty but it sounds like either some IDE trouble or your hard drive.

It could just be a borked part of the boot sector hanging around. No idea, try another HD and if that works zero the current one out.

Sorry for all the trouble you're having. It really sucks.

ChrisB · Jul 11, 2003, 04:53 PM

Make sure that you at least once startup in single user mode, and run fsck from the terminal screen. Fsck will do wonders repairing your disc when the standard disk utility won't, and single user mode allows you to boot your system and troubleshoot it and do things like repair permissions when you need to. Almost always solves the startup issue you descibe.