Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

jorgem4 · Jan 18, 2005, 05:27 PM

A friend of mine has this problem:

Not booting PB gray screen with finder icon bliking...what to do?

He called apple care and they told him to re-install the OS. He is running Panther (I think) but for sure MacOS X.

Any other suggestions would be good. Or a procedure on the best way to get this PB healthy again. He is bringing his PB to my place to try to re-live this poor Mac. So I thought I would post this to get the help of the Apple Guru community of MacNN.

Thanks,

mdc · Jan 18, 2005, 05:55 PM

try turning it on holding the option key which should show you the available operating systems it found to boot off.

booting with x held down should force it to boot to os X

worst case, do an archive and install of os X. it will save his user folder, his apps, just replacing the actual os files.

jorgem4 · Jan 18, 2005, 07:25 PM

mdc,

Thanks a lot for the advise. I will do so and report the results of the procedure.

jorgem4 · Jan 18, 2005, 10:39 PM

I tried installing the system but when the part of selecting a destination comes on there is no HD to intall it on to. Nothing appears on the selection box.

So I opened the disk utility and in first aid the only options avalible are verify disk and repaired disk. I did a ify disk and the results are the following:

It says that first aid failed. Invalid B-tree node size
The volume needs to be repaied

Volume check failed.

Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit (-9972)

I also tried booting in target mode and it worked but the HD did not appear on my computer so I could not back up the files.

Any other ideas?

Thanks.

Detrius · Jan 18, 2005, 11:40 PM

The blinking question mark means the machine can't find an operating system. In your case, the directory structure is hosed, so the machine can't read the volume. This could be a simple fix with Disk Warrior, but you may also have bad blocks (bad hard drive) corrupting the directory structure. If you can boot into OS 9, you can run a surface scan using Drive Setup Utility (any error here means bad hard drive). If not, Tech Tool Pro 4 does a surface scan. Disk Warrior 3 is the best for directory structure repair.