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alon99 · Feb 12, 2006, 12:30 PM

Hi Everyone,

I have a mac mini, which has suddenly stopped working - it goes through the booting process, but hangs when the bar is nearly complete and the screen says "Starting Mac OS X..." - I've left it in this state overnight, but there's still no progress.

I've tried booting from the CD and running the disk repair utility. At first, it was giving me an error that it couldn't run the utility, but now it runs fine and detects no errors on the hard drive. The disk repair didn't help the problem.

I tried resetting the PRAM, but that didn't do anything either.

The system can boot into firewire mode, but I don't have another mac to copy the files onto.

Has anyone had this problem before? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you,

Alon

Big Mac · Feb 12, 2006, 12:58 PM

Have you done an Archive and Install reinstall of the OS?

eevyl · Feb 12, 2006, 01:00 PM

Also tried to repair permissions as well as the disk?

alon99 · Feb 12, 2006, 01:16 PM

Hi guys, thanks for your replies. I tried repairing the permissions, and there was no change - it doesnt appear that there were any problems with the permissions.

Big Mac - I've never done an archive and install - I wasn't exactly sure what it did. If I do that, will I lose any of my files or photos?

Thanks!

wataru · Feb 12, 2006, 01:56 PM

No. That's the whole point of archive & install.

Detrius · Feb 12, 2006, 11:01 PM

Before doing a reinstall, boot the machine in verbose mode and let is know what it says as the last half-dozen or so lines.

Hold down command-v after the chime, before you see the Apple logo. You can let go after you see the logo.

alon99 · Feb 14, 2006, 12:24 PM

Hi Detrius,

Thanks for your reply. I booted the machine as you instructed, and this is what came up:

Matching service count = 0
Matching service count = 1
Matching service count = 1
Matching service count = 1
Matching service count = 1
Feb 14 00:16:06 kextd[29]: 308 cached, 0 uncached personalities to catalog
UniNEnet: Ethernet address 00:0d:93:5e:39:2c
Feb 14 00:16:19 localhost mDNSResponder -107 (Mar 20 2005 20: 31:47)[40]: starting
Feb 14 00:16:19 localhost DirectoryService[47]: Launched version 2.0.2 (v350.2)
Feb 14 00:16:22 localhost mDNSResponder: Adding browse domain local.

Does that suggest anything to you? Thanks for your help!

Alon

alon99 · Feb 19, 2006, 07:34 PM

Just to let everyone know, I ended up doing an Archive and Install, as suggested by the people here. It worked great, and the computer is back up and running now.

I was most surprised by the fact that it recognized all of the programs, and I didn't need to reinstall anything. I'm used to working on windows systems where you need to re-install every program from scratch if you re-install the OS. Hats off to apple!

Alon

littlejohn · Feb 20, 2006, 12:25 AM

Originally Posted by alon99

I'm used to working on windows systems where you need to re-install every program from scratch if you re-install the OS. Hats off to apple!

Alon

Umm yeah... that's because in the PC world, everything is written into the registry but the Mac world is more like the MS DOS days, where the installed app is essentially written to a directory with a few prefernences written in other areas. This is all fine and dandy until you have to uninstall the app, then it is pretty much a search and destroy game ;-)

Btw.. from about Win XP onwards, if you do a repair.. you shouldn't have to reinstall your apps.. Just reapply all the SPs and updates.