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meki22 · Nov 11, 2006, 01:34 PM

Hi guys, ive been reading the forums and ive been trying to look for an answer for my dillemma here. I bought a second hand ibook G4. First two weeks, the machine worked really well. No complaints whatsoever. Last night after shutting it down, i turned it on again about 2 hours later. What happens is that it hangs at the screen saying "Login window starting" or something like that. The colored wheel just keeps spinning. I tried going on to apple.com and tried resetting the PRAM but to no avail. Pls if anyone can help me i would greatly appreciate it. Im scared sh**less bec i have no clue as to how mac's work and i had to borrow money just so i can purchase this. Thanks in advance!

slpdLoad · Nov 11, 2006, 02:17 PM

Try this and see if it will boot up completely, then if it does, restart normally and see if it fixes itself.

Mac OS X: Starting up in Safe Mode

meki22 · Nov 11, 2006, 04:26 PM

Originally Posted by slpdLoad

Try this and see if it will boot up completely, then if it does, restart normally and see if it fixes itself.

Mac OS X: Starting up in Safe Mode

Tried it and it still wont work. even in safe mode it wont boot.

Any other suggestions?

fivell · Nov 11, 2006, 07:31 PM

To start a process of troubleshooting; do you have an osx cd? Or maybe an external firewire dvd drive?
If so, try , if you have the osx cd, to boot from the cd by restarting your computer(cd inserted) while holding down the "C" key. Once booted run Disk Utiliy.
If you have both FW dvd and osx cd, boot from the FW drive and restart while holding down the option key, and choose the FW drive when the possible startup icons show up. From there you can run Disk Utility to see if you have a hardware/software problem.

If this is new, I assume you don't have much data on it? It might be better to wipe the HD and reinstall osx, the problem is likely to disapear with little time spent troubleshooting.

There are also a number of utility programs that are bootable like DiskWarrior and my favorite Prosofts Drive Genius, these are very valuable to have on hand, along with an external DVD drive.

Starting a process of troubleshooting, this way or another, wil make figuring out your problems much easier.