[waffffffle]

Panther refuses to boot fully on my Pismo. After the progress bar (which doesn't fully complete) I get a blue screen. I can move the mouse and if I hit cmd-opt-esc it will eventually bring up a force quit window which shows the finder blinking (apparently repeatedly trying to start itself). I can hit the power key and restart/sleep/shutdown/cancel from the dialog that appears.

I mounted the Pismo's internal hard disk on another machine using target disk mode. I "repaired" the disk using disk utility and I "repaired OS 9 permissions" (I couldn't find anything about OS X permissions in the app). I still have the same problem.

Does anyone know what I can do? I would prefer not to have to reformat the machine. It has been giving me trouble lately and I have reinstalled OS X on it a couple of times recently. I don't want to have to do it again.

[gorickey]

Something is jacked in your user folder's Library I have a feeling...you can replace that and see how far you get....

[Sophus]

Have you tried safe mode? Press left shift while booting. Also, Disk warrior may be of help. Is your machine set to boot up to your user desktop, or to login window?

Anyway, have a look at these options:
Q. My MAC will not boot._ What should I do?


A. You can "Safe Boot" OSX by holding down the Shift key immediatly after you hear the startup tone (not before). Release the key when you see the grey loading screen with the Apple logo. If you did it right you should see "Safe Boot" when the OSX loading dialog appears.


A. You can "Boot from CD" by holding down the “c” key immediatly after you hear the startup tone (not before). Release the key when you see the grey loading screen with the Apple logo.

There is a disk utility on the OSX installation CD which might fix the problem.

A. You can Boot OSX into “Single User Mode” by holding down the Apple and “S” keys immediatly after you hear the startup tone (not before).
You can then run fsck to repair the partition, following the on screen instructions.


A. Another mode you can try is the verbose mode._ Hold down Apple-V during start up) and let it go. It will return some errors (keys error, among others), but eventually it "might" get you to your desktop

_

[waffffffle]

I tried safe boot, same problem. Booting off an OS 9 CD doesn't show the hard disk and Disk First Aid can't see it. I ran the Tech Tool CD that comes with AppleCare and it did nothing. Everything it found it said was OK.

I reformatted. Since I recently reformatted I didn't have to back up much, just some preferences.

It's still not working all that well. It freezes when trying to install things in CPAN. This is very disconcerting.