I'm a long time Mac (but not OSX) user, and am stumped with this. I'm hoping some people here will be able to help, before I have to resort to a reinatall of OSX. I've tried searching the forums, but wasn't able to find anyone with quite this problem.
Here's the situation:
I have had a new iBook for a little over a week (with the factory-installed OS updated to 10.2.6), and tried booting into OS9 for the first time a couple of dsys ago. When it was time to return to X, I set the startup disk control panel appropriately, and restarted. However, my machine hung on restart, and I was forced to do a hard restart. I was expecting no problems after this little hiccup, but got many. The machine would just sit at the grey Apple logo screen indefinitely, not doing anything at all. Upon closer examination, the Apple logo screen would come up, and then be immediately "replaced" by a screen with the same apple logo on light grey background, but the logo was shifted approximately 10 pixels lower than in the image that first appeared. This same behavior also occurs when holding down the "X" key at startup.
I next tried holding down the option key, selecting my hard drive, and proceeding to boot. This resulted in a "prohibitory" sign, that would seem to indicate that my "/System" folder is not bootable. This was the only way I was able to produce the prohibitory sign icon.
Getting frustrated, I zapped the PRAM, tried the open firmware reset commands, and repaired permissions and verified the hard disk using the Disk Utility on the OSX install CDs that came with my iBook. Unfortunately, however, none of these actions resulted in a boot to OSX either. Finally, I booted with an OS9 CD, ran Disk First Aid, and set the "/System" folder as my startup folder. None of these methods resulted in an OSX boot either.
So I guess my questions are:
Has anyone else had the same or very similar problems, and what did you do to remedy the problems?
What could have possibly caused this to occur? The crash before restart in OS9? Dual booting in general?
Does anyone else have ANY suggestions besides a reinstall of OSX? I probably shouldn't be against this option, but I'm trying to avoid it.
What can I do to prevent this from occuring in the future?
I would like to thank everyone in advance for any help they can provide. This has been a very frustrating experience, especially considering that Apple prides themselves on providing a reliable and easy to use operating system.
Thanks again,
Steve