[loki74]

Okay... I've just spend the past 9 or so hours helping a friend of mine out with a project for a high school film history class. We finished the cut, and were ready to burn the dvd.

So i quickly slap together a menu in DVDSP, and hit burn. It gets to 91%, and just stays there, for easily half an hour. So i decide to cancel. That takes a while, but it works. I try again, and it hangs at 0%. It's acting veeery very slow, and I have a few other apps running as well (namely, FCP and photoshop..possibly some other minor apps) so i close them out. most i have to force quit, and it takes forever.

DVDSP actually doesn't quit at all.. the dock icon just stayed dark (i quit from the dock's contextual menu) for a while... so i ended up just shutting down the computer manually. I try to boot it up, it it gets stuck at the white apple screen with the spinning circle thing. Wait a while... reboot again.

this time, it flashes the white apple screen for a second, and then brings me to a command line prompt that says:

/etc/master.password:no such file or directory
/etc/master.password:no such file or directory
-sh-2.05b#

I have never had any major problems with my mac... I've done manual reboots before, hell the UPS thing has even killed power to my computer once or twice, but it alway has bounced back... any tips would be much appreciated!!

system:
PowerMac G5 Dual 2.5
Mac OSX 10.3.9 (yeah, i know...)
pretty much standard everything else, except for some extra ram i installed....

thanks in advance,
loki

[Big Mac]

It looks like there's some drive corruption there. You can look through this macosxhints.com thread. I'd try single user mode fsck.

I'd really like to see a thread with common problems like this one and solutions to them.

[Sherman Homan]

Single user mode and fsck is a good start, if you have your original install disk you can boot from that and instead of going through the system installation process, choose Disk Utility and then Repair Disk.

[loki74]

Thanks guys.

I saw the thread, tried some of the stuff, to no avail.

I read that one of the people who experienced the problem solved it by reinstalling... unfortunately, my only OSX install disc is for 10.3.5 (i think, anyway, its not .9) and I have some stuff that needs 10.3.9. So I went ahead and got Tiger. Installed, and it works. All my stuff is still here, safe and sound.

Unfortunately, I get some bullcrap error when I'm using FCP... but that's beyond the scope of this sub-forum.

thanks again!



just some extra info about the problem--

-in the command line, if i let it sit long enough, the computer's fans would just go nuts.
-I tried doing disk repair by booting to my Panther disc. The progress bar would fill, and hang at 100%.
-If I tried to repair permissions (I was just hitting buttons at this point) it would get about halfway through and spit out a message along the lines of loosing connection with the disk manager or something (dont remember exactly).
-Prior to the incident, the computer became INSANELY slow.
-This problem appeared in the other threads to be associated with a System 9 Install trashing stuff OSX needs, however, I've never had a System 9 or Classic install.
-I can't remember exactly, but I think someone in one of the other threads mentioned power outage as a possible cause--this is consistent with my experience.

[peeb]

It doesn't matter that your install disc is for 10.3.5. You can boot from it as a live CD.

[Sherman Homan]

Ditto peeb. Even if you had to re-install you would get a nice clean 10.3.5 system, then automatically update to 10.3.9. But welcome to Tiger! Glad all your data was healthy!

[peeb]

Tiger is worth it though anyway.

[loki74]

Originally Posted by peeb 

It doesn't matter that your install disc is for 10.3.5. You can boot from it as a live CD.

yea I was able to boot off of the CD--that's how I got to the disk repair. I just wasn't sure if there was any risk in reverting to 10.3.5. And like you said, Tiger's worth it anyway. ~_^