[Partisan01]

My friend has a iBook 500 white. It won't boot up, she's running 10.2.8, and has been running it fine for a while. What happens is it will get to the grey screen with the apple on it and sit there forever. She said she let it run for a day and a half thinking it would load and no go.

Here's what I've tried. She said the HD (10gig) might be full. She has 10.2.8 and 9.2 on there, so I booted form the 9.2.1 cd (only one around at the time) to see if we could clear some stuff from the HD. The CD booted fine, but didn't show the hard drive as a mounted volume. Ran the disk checker on it because it's a HFS partition. Found a minor error with the Bit Table, and a major error not listed. Tried to run the repair program and it said it was to major to repair.

She zapped the PRAM a few times earlier in the day..nothing.

Booted into OpenFirmware to see if anything was mis-set in there. All variables looked fine. Attempted to boot from the hard drive with the command
boot hd:,//tbxi no go, but it did boot with 'mac-boot'. I think I didn't give it enough of a path for the boot loader no biggy.

Couldn't think of anything else. If anyone has any ideas or any help at all it would be appreciated.

Nate

--for reference, I've been hacking OpenFirmware on my B&W recently, so I'm pretty familiar with it. I do more unix stuff on a mac then mac stuff, I'm also very new to the platform (2 months new) so I don't have tons of problem solving behind me.

[k_munic]

do you have access to another mac?

connect both machines with a firewirecable

try to start the iBook in target mode (press the on-button and on the keyboard the letter "t").

look, if the other mac accepts the iBook as an external firwrie hd.

clear the mess up - hopefully

btw: it is a lil' dangerous to repair a 10.x system in 9er mode! there are millions of hidden files on the disk which are needful for the 10system...-

and: your diagnoses seems to be very good - hd get full, system got confused... poor system.-

hope, it work!

[-Q-]

I'd recommend picking up a copy of DiskWarrior. It should be able to clear most problems up fine. You can boot directly from the CD, or if you can get the iBook to mount in FW Disk mode, you can use it from the other Mac to repair the drive.

[Partisan01]

Thanks. I have a copy of DiskWarrior I'll take that over to her, and if that doesn't work at the least we can hook her mac up to mine and grab the important files off of it if we have to wipe it out. Thanks again.

Nate

[webb3201]

Nate, the backup and wipe/restore may be the best bet. I recovered a lot of space on my 10gb iBook after the first wipe in two years.