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entelechy · Nov 26, 2004, 11:33 PM

Part 3 and the nightmare continues...please restore my faith in Macs!

My Powerbook G4/667 will now not boot past the opening light gray screen with the Apple icon...the circulating ring beneath the Apple never even appears. Despite long waits it never advances beyond this point.

I've tried running the latest version of Disc Warrior successfully - nothing changed.

Tried booting in Safe Mode - and it had no effect, still never went past the initial screen.

Used Target Disc Mode on my wife's G4 Powerbook to reinstall (Archive & Install) Jaguar (only have Panther upgrade discs). This was due to a faltering drive on my machine. Despite an apparent smooth and successful installation, the computer still has the same problem above.

I recently ordered a new G5 Tower which should come in a couple weeks and tried the AppleCare "Tech Deluxe" disc they sent ahead...according to it, everything passed.

Since I can't even begin to get into the computer, I can't think of anything left to try and am at my wit's end. I need the computer for work Monday morning and am thinking of trying to take it in to one of Apple's "Genius Bars" at the Apple Store.

I've never had such a hard time with a Mac! All of this began after wiping and rebuilding my computer to drop my OS 9 partition and open up some more room. I also bumped the RAM up to 1GB (3rd party from Crucial, but it seems to be working fine and passed the tests I ran).

Everything seemed to be working fine after the rebuild until I used the latest version of Tech Tool Pro to optimize my hard drive and external drives. I began getting locked out of programs, etc. with the spinning ball of death. Dumping caches and trashing system & user prefs seemed to get everything working again for a day.

Then I reworked my Font Book with 1400 fonts I installed. I went through all of them (I am beginning to do a lot more Graphic Design work) and disabled all but 3-400. After this I started quickly experiencing problems launching apps with the spinning ball of death again, and when I went to reboot, I got stuck at the level reported above.

If worse comes to worse, I can wipe and rebuild everything again instead of doing an Archive & Install, but after the last round, I'm afraid nothing I do will make any difference if it's not even beginning to boot up.

This is a hail mary to the more experienced out there, so thanks in advance to anyone who answers

~Chris

Fillman · Nov 26, 2004, 11:50 PM

I've never seen anything as bad as this. How about taking out your extra RAM and trying a reboot. It just might be a bad set of RAM.

Randman · Nov 27, 2004, 01:04 AM

I agree. Take out the ram, even if it shows as passed, it could be corupted. I'd also stick with just what you have in font book. If you need more fonts for graphic work, get extensis or keep them on an external.
You can copy what you need to your wife's. So do that and do a clean install, no archive. See if that works.

entelechy · Nov 27, 2004, 10:26 AM

Thanks guys, I'll give it a try

A friend and co-worker, Kaz7777 (who introduced me to this site) was also having problems with fonts, so I forgot to mention I downloaded some font software referenced on this site, to clean caches that helped him out just before attempting the last reboot.

I'm going to change out the RAM again now and hope for the best

Thanks again,
~C

Tsilou B. · Nov 27, 2004, 01:02 PM

Have a look at this post:

http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.p...96#post2280712

and if your wife has a Powerbook, too, and that one's running fine, then why don't you let her computer boot in target disk mode, connect it to your Powerbook, hold down the option key while booting and select her disk as boot volume.

If your PB doesn't work from her disk, although her PB runs fine, then you can be sure that you have a hardware problem. If your Powerbook works fine if you boot from her disk, you should check your hard drive - if it's ok, you can simply do a real reinstallation and your computer will be fine again, otherwise your hard drive is broken and caused the errors.

tooki · Nov 27, 2004, 02:36 PM

Originally posted by entelechy:
Everything seemed to be working fine after the rebuild until I used the latest version of Tech Tool Pro to optimize my hard drive and external drives.

Well there we have it. Defragmenting (what TTP calls optimizing) is an invasive process, and if anything goes wrong, it can hose the drive.

Have you tried just reformatting and then reinstalling everything?

tooki

entelechy · Nov 27, 2004, 05:26 PM

Tsilou B - thanks, see below for update

Tooki - absolutely! Boy have I learned that lesson

I was pleasantly surprised to learn more about this in another thread from members of this group - one more of the wonders of Panther, defraging on the fly!

I ended up taking the laptop into the Genius Bar at the nearest Apple Store (also shocked to find out their service is free if under 15 min. and no hardware, etc.). I was informed that it must've been a corrupt system folder causing it not to boot.

He ran some diagnostics (off an iPod no less!) and said the RAM was fine and all else was fine as well. He was also surprised at the speed and said it was really running well and that I'd kept it in good shape...I have no idea how to interpret all this based on the graphs he was running, but it was nice to hear at least.

He told me to do a complete wipe and reinstall, but to be sure to use the disc utilities to zero out before erasing (this was also new to me, but good to learn). I did this and just reinstalled Jaguar. I'll do this again when the Panther discs come with the G5 Tower in another week.

Everything seems to be fine now. Last but not least, as a new member, I'm delighted to have found this forum, and thanks so much to everyone who offered help; I hope to return the favor as I get more up to speed

~C

Parky · Nov 27, 2004, 06:56 PM

Originally posted by entelechy:
Tsilou B - thanks, see below for update

Tooki - absolutely! Boy have I learned that lesson I was pleasantly surprised to learn more about this in another thread from members of this group - one more of the wonders of Panther, defraging on the fly!

I ended up taking the laptop into the Genius Bar at the nearest Apple Store (also shocked to find out their service is free if under 15 min. and no hardware, etc.). I was informed that it must've been a corrupt system folder causing it not to boot.

He ran some diagnostics (off an iPod no less!) and said the RAM was fine and all else was fine as well. He was also surprised at the speed and said it was really running well and that I'd kept it in good shape...I have no idea how to interpret all this based on the graphs he was running, but it was nice to hear at least.

He told me to do a complete wipe and reinstall, but to be sure to use the disc utilities to zero out before erasing (this was also new to me, but good to learn). I did this and just reinstalled Jaguar. I'll do this again when the Panther discs come with the G5 Tower in another week.

Everything seems to be fine now. Last but not least, as a new member, I'm delighted to have found this forum, and thanks so much to everyone who offered help; I hope to return the favor as I get more up to speed

~C

The Panther discs that you get with your G5 PowerMac will not work on your PowerBook.

The discs that Apple ship with computers are now only suitable for the machines they are delivered with and can cause major problems if you try to use them. They will not have all the items that your PowerBook requires.

You need to buy a retail version of Panther (or wait for Tiger) as these discs are the only ones that will have everything on them that each model of machine will require.

Sorry to tell you that, but it's the way Apple work now.

Ian

tooki · Nov 27, 2004, 09:14 PM

Absolute nonsense. The install discs are not hardware-specific, other than that you can't use a disc older than the Mac you're installing on.

The last time Apple made machine-specific install was with Mac OS 8.6.

tooki

Parky · Nov 28, 2004, 05:21 AM

Originally posted by tooki:
Absolute nonsense. The install discs are not hardware-specific, other than that you can't use a disc older than the Mac you're installing on.

The last time Apple made machine-specific install was with Mac OS 8.6.

tooki

Then good luck!

Any problems you know where to go.

Ian

Fonzie · Nov 28, 2004, 07:57 AM

Does zero'ing the harddrive have anything to to with booting ? Maybe that's a good option if all things fails? I'm by no means a hardware guy.

brapper · Nov 28, 2004, 01:02 PM

Originally posted by Fonzie:
Does zero'ing the harddrive have anything to to with booting ? Maybe that's a good option if all things fails? I'm by no means a hardware guy.

I just means taht Disk Utility will rewrite everything on the hard drive as zeros.