[bbales]

I posted this (in two parts) on the OSX board, but it occurs to me this might be a hardware issue, not the OS. So now I'm posting here.

My G4 was running slowly, and safari refused to start at all, so I rebooted. Got nothing but the blue screen. Rebooted again and got the gray screen with the spinning logo.

Rebooted in single-user mode and got something (I didn't write it down) about having trouble with something on a usb port (no. 2), but then supposedly it fixed that. But it wouldn't go to the "local host" section, so I could run fsck. Tried booting into safe mode and couldn't do that. Tried single-user mode again (after unplugging just my usb printer.

Got a whole bunch of writing, which I did write down (though I realize now I can't read very well!

It includes: "using 1966 buffer headers and 1966 cluster IO buffer headers."

Then it says;
"Adaptec warning: resetting SCSI bus
Firewire (OHCI) TI ID 8020 built-in now active, GUID 003065ff fed2a75ai
max speed s400


waiting,dictID=07.,key.10provider
classL/key><stringIO=1>10resources</string><key>IOresoruceMatch</key><string>ID="2".boot-uuid-media</string></dict>gotbootdevice=10service:/core99PE/pci@f2000000/AppleMacRiscPCI/PCI-bridge@DKOPC12PCEBridge/Mac-io@7/
appleKeyLargo/ata-4@lf0000/keyLargoATA/
ATADevicehub@1ll0dataBlockStorageDrive/IOATABlockStorageDevice/10BlockStorageDriver/ST31200264 Media/10ApplePartitionScheme/Apple-HFS_Untitled_2??10 (NOTE: question marks aare b/c I cannot read my writing)
SOroot:disk0s10,major14,minor10
in6-ifattach-Linclocal:failed to configurea linc-local address of Lo0
errno=55 -- NOTE -- may not be 55 as the "5's" were split b/n lines)
in6-ifattach:l00failed to attach a lincLocal address

OK -- any help here? I have never had this happen before. I do have diskwarrior. I haven't tried it yet b/c I can't even get the machine booted.

Please help.

Is it some sort of SCSI problem or something else? I may have to invest in actual Genius help at an Apple store.

Thanks in advance.

[BigBadBiologist]

Is your main harddrive SCSI? If not, pull the SCSI card and see if it boots.

[bbales]

Well -- I can't imagine that it IS SCSI -- it's a gigabit ethernet G4, 400 MZ upgraded to 900. I remember having to add the SCSI card when I had it built six years ago, and that was to run ... something, a printer perhaps? I think that was it.

I also put in a new drive a couple years ago. I'm virtually certain those are not SCSI drives.

There's a ZIP drive in the computer, but that was added at the time I built it also. Pretty sure that's SCSI. I also know I don't exactly use ZIP drives every day, or even once a month.

That's a start. Thanks.

[imitchellg5]

Take out the Adaptec SCSI card.

[bbales]

I did. And it still wouldn't boot. I called Apple and while the guy said he thought it probably would be hardware-related, he did suggest booting from the install disks and running disk utility and hardware diagnostics, if I could get to that.

So I was able to boot from the disk, and repaired a drive that didn't need repairing. Also repaired permissions, while I was at it. I did some meandering in the various programs, and found, under extensions, a while section if IO Audio Family, that would indicate incomplete dependencies, and dependency errors. I'm not sure what they're on, though.

Then, in restarting, I decided to restart from an old drive, the original, which I used before installoing a nice 120 GB drive a couple years ago.

And it booted! Of course, it was running 10.3.7, but at least it booted. Tried to boot using my regular drive and no go. So I rebooted back from the install disk, did an archive installation of Tiger and I'm back in business. Still have NO IDEA what happened. My mouse is giving me fits -- and I do wonder if perhaps this Kensington USB hub (to which the Logitech mouse is connected) is the source of my troubles. I like the hub, but it's definitely not worth this trouble.

I still have to reinstall Tiger updates, but at least the computer works.

Anyone have any insight into what the core trouble is? And by the way, I hate this Apple mouse I'm having to use at the moment.

[reader50]

You may have an intermittent problem with the normal drive, keep an eye on it in the future.

But I'm going to assume it's not a hardware problem in the rest of this answer. Something happened during normal operation. Something on the HD may have been thrashed, or you developed a bad block on disk and the HD mapped it out. Either way, you tried to restart and the system 'repaired' the boot drive.

In fact, it fixed the directory structure, but had no way of retrieving the lost data. With damaged (or missing) system files, the system can easily fail to boot. Much later, when you booted from CD and checked the disk, the directory structure was fine. It had been repaired several boots back. But your OS install was dodgy.

[bbales]

Thanks for the help and advice. Somewhere along the way, I checked (system profiler) the extensions and there were some problems with kext dependency (invalid), etc. It was in the "IOAudiofamily" portion. After I reinstalled the OS, that part was all listed as fine.

I'm going to post this next part in the "applications" forum. Could the logitech control center software have screwed up my system to that extent? WHen I returned to my regular mouse, the programming was gone, and so was the Logitech Control Center software from the preference pane. When I tried to re-install it I got a warning note from the system, essentially telling me that the software image was a bad image and proceeding could damage my system/computer and did I want to continue? Well, of course not. I still had a previous version somewhere on my computer and got the same message. I found a still earlier one (from 2004, I think) and was getting ready to install that, but decided against it, as who knows if that one even works with Tiger?

I just thought that was very intersting, and I wonder if using LCC somehow corrupted the OS.

[applgeek]

it is surely posible. A bad image can put corrupted code on your system and mess up things that have no affiliation with the mouse driver.

As noted earlier, your drive could be dying. Make sure you have backups!