[MAlan]

o.k. this my first serious mac problem in 4 years. I need help taking the next step.

First the problem: My 500 MHz white ibook with 10 G hard drive won't boot up past the spinning wheel thing and the grey apple logo in the background.

What happened before the problem: ibook crashed at shut down and would not shut down completely before power off. This happened twice. The first time it booted after quite a long time in spinning wheel land. The next time it would not boot past spinning wheel (that's where I am now).

What have I done since: I booted of my Mac OS 10.3 disk, changed start up folder and booted into OS 9. I backed up some recent stuff and then booted off the disk again to run disk utility to try to repair the hard drive.

That didn't work. My hypothesis is that while the hard drive was repaired there is a critical system file that is corrupt. I need to repair the Mac OS X system files but I'd rather not have to re-install. If anyone knows how I can fix this without doing a re-install please let me know. Otherwise I'll probably do an archive and install. If I do that does anyone know how to back up my ical calender before I do that or won't ical be overwritten?

Thanks

[chris v]

An archive and install (if it's sucessful) won't overwrite your calendars. They're stored in

/Users/(username)/Library/Calendars

so if you've backed up your user folder, you've already got backups of your calendars. If not, you should boot back into OS 9 and grab them.

before you go to the trouble of archiving and installing though, you might (this is only a wild guess) try trashing your logingwindow.plist file. This worked for me one time when I was in a similar spot. There's two:

/Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist

and

Users/(username)//Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist

May as well ditch those while you're booted into 9 backing up your calendars.

CV

[philzilla]

have you got another OS X mac you can hook it up to via target firewire mode? if so, try that. you can fiddle with files in an X environment then

[bergy]

You might want to try Disk Warrior before reinstalling if you have it ... good to have around anyway.

[MAlan]

o.k. it's been a while since I revisited this problem. I got my ibook to boot up into OS X back in April. There is still something wrong with the install though. Something is corrupt but will allow me to do normal things like surf the internet and save simple text files to the hard drive.

I tried to run the Mac OS 10.3.3 updater a while back and it wouldn't work. My software update won't work. No installation packages will work properly. The installer starts then says 'checking packages' or something similar and then that's it. I get the spinning beach ball and I have to force quit. Note this is on any intaller not just the OS updates.

So will trashing the loginwindow.plist file help with this? I would doubt it.

So I tried a couple things. I tried running an installer across the airport network from my iMac. That didn't work since the installer didn't list the ibook's hard drive as a possible target. Next I tried to place the installer on my firewire disk and run it from there on my ibook. That didn't work since I got the same spinning beach ball problem.

I'm considering doing the following. Install Mac OS X on my firewire disk. Then boot from the firewire disk. Then run the installer to update the OS X install on the internal ibook disk. I think this would work but it sounds like too much work.

Anyone have any better ideas? And what is target firewire mode? Is that when you can hook up two macs with a firewire cable? I have the equipment to do this someone just has to tell me how.

[wataru]

Have you tried making another user? If the problems still happen from another user's account then the problem must be with the system.

If the problem still happens from a different account, you really should do an archive install. Your system sounds so fubar'd that I wouldn't even bother trying to fiddle with it. Nuke & pave. Although I guess it's not really "nuking" with an archive install.