[Paco Loco]

I have an old white iBook with OS X 10.2.8 on it. As it's my home machine it's not been connected to the internet much (I do all my computing at work) and so has never had a security update.

I connected it to the internet yesterday via a broadband connection and straight away it wanted to do security updates, three or four of them which took about 2 hours to download/install.

Once it had installed them it told me to restart so I did and now it won't start up! It gets past the grey screen with the apple logo, does the extensions type stuff, then goes to the blue screen and thats where it stops. It just hangs there indefinitely.

I have tried the following; zapped the PRAM, run fcsk, booting up in safe mode, run the hardware check disc. None of these have helped.

I am at the stage where I think I will have to reinstall the OS... Anyone have any other ideas I can try first? Or know why the hell this happened in the first place??!

Thanks, P.

[Randman]

Did you run security updates that were Jaguar-specific?

[Paco Loco]

I just ran everything that the Software Update utility prompted me to run. I assumed it would know what it needed...

[Randman]

Repair permissions, to begin with.

Create a new user and see if the problems persist.

Check Apple.com and see what the last SU for Jaguar was and try and download them and reinstall.

If you have a backup in place, consider that as well.

[Paco Loco]

Will I be able to do the first two things you suggested (permissions and create new user) from the command line in the single-user interface? That is the way in I have at the moment.

[ShotgunEd]

Start from a CD to repair permissions.