[laurirowe]

Hi -

I've been on the Mac discussion boards, asked a few friends, and am now finding additional boards to see if I can find an answer to what's happened to my Mac.

I have a 12" Powerbook G4, OSX 10.3.8, 37gb drive (14 gb still avail), perfectly smooth machine. This morning my system crashed and force quit was not an option so I had to do a hard shutdown by holding the power button.

After restarting, I got the grey screen and the dial that just keeps spinning and never starts up. I've tried taking the battery out for a few minutes, zapping the P-Ram, running Disk Utility from the Panther install disk, doing the fsck -fy trick, trying to boot in safe mode, holding down option to select my hard drive, and nothing.

The only hope that I have is that when I ran the Disk Utility, it showed that there was 23gb used on the drive - which is exactly where it was when it crashed.

If it comes down to it, is there anyway to download Disk Warrior or Tech Tools and create a bootable disk from the download? Does anyone have any other tricks that I can try?

Thanks,
Lauri

[cpac]

honestly - I'd just try waiting a long time - my guess is that it will eventually start up, but that it's taking it a while to do the disk repair.

[theolein]

You could possibly have a damaged kernel cache file, since the fact that it is showing the spining dial means that it found the hard drive and the boot loader file (a file called BootX). You could try booting in safe mode, which ignores the kernel caches, but since you say you've done that, then perhaps single user mode will work. I see you say you've tried the "fsck -fy", which means you got the machine to boot that far at least. This means that the kernel at least is loading. I have an inkling it might be the loginwindow.app that has a problem, but that can be worked around by booting into single user mode, mounting the filesystem for writing and using vi to change the line that executes loginwindow.app in /etc/ttys by commenting out the line that has loginwindow on it and uncommenting the line that has vt100 on it. If the machine then boots, you know what is wrong.

I'm sorry if this isn't much help. It would be easiest if you had an external drive that you could boot from or the use of someone else's mac to access your machine in firewire target mode. http://www.charlessoft.com/ has a utility that allows you to make bootable CD's, but again, you'll need another mac to make one.

[osxisfun]

this may or may not help but try rebooting after you unplug your network cable.. i have seen something like this in the past and it worked (then you can plug in the cable again)

[Angus_D]

Try holding down cmd-v at boot, see if you get the verbose boot screen. It might give you more interesting diagnostic information.

[powermacj7]

Originally posted by Angus_D:
Try holding down cmd-v at boot, see if you get the verbose boot screen. It might give you more interesting diagnostic information.

Moreover, if you have the hardware diagnostic CD try that to see if it flags any concerns, not a great solution, it may help.

[Big Mac]

Originally posted by theolein:
You could possibly have a damaged kernel cache file, since the fact that it is showing the spining dial means that it found the hard drive and the boot loader file (a file called BootX). You could try booting in safe mode, which ignores the kernel caches, but since you say you've done that, then perhaps single user mode will work. I see you say you've tried the "fsck -fy", which means you got the machine to boot that far at least. This means that the kernel at least is loading. I have an inkling it might be the loginwindow.app that has a problem, but that can be worked around by booting into single user mode, mounting the filesystem for writing and using vi to change the line that executes loginwindow.app in /etc/ttys by commenting out the line that has loginwindow on it and uncommenting the line that has vt100 on it. If the machine then boots, you know what is wrong.

Just out of curiosity, why do you suspect vt100? That's a terminal protocol, right? If he uncomments that line and it does boot, what would that mean? Also, if he's stuck at the grey Apple logo, why would it be login window? Isn't login window only loaded at the end of the Welcome screen, right before the login window appears?

[theolein]

I don't suspect vt100, I was simply wondering if it might be the loginwindow app. If he uncomments the vt100 line and comments the loginwindow.app line and the console actually booted then it would indicate that the loginwindow is perhaps the problem since that app is the last thing that is loaded after the boot screen.