I know how you feel. I encountered such problems with my G4ed beige. No probs so far with my Sawtooth, however, and I'm looking for a piece of wood on which to knock.
Here's some things to consider. I hope I am not giving any info that is dated to the point of being bad, but as a disclaimer, I have not needed to try any of this in quite a while.
You say your computer starts up in cmmand line mode.
try typing /sbin/fsck -y [return]
[[in this and all typed entries below, be sure and include the spaces as shown]]
If this does not work, try the following series of actions, one series at a time. Hopefully before you reach the end of this list, something will have worked.
Temporarily remove 3rd party startup items from /lib/startupitems and /sys/lib/startupitems (while booted in OS 9) and then try restarting.
Disconnect USB, firewire, and ethernet cables and try restarting.
Remove PCI cards, extra RAM chips, and any processor upgrade if any and then try restarting.
Startup in single user mode (command-S) until white text appears. At command line type: fsck -y [return] type mount -uw / [return] type chmod 1775 / [return] type reboot [return]
Reset cuda switch
Startup in safe mode: Shutdown Press Power button At tone press shift key and hold until gray apple appears After safe boot, restart normally
Boot into open firmware (command-OF) from shutdown. type reset-nvram [return] type reset-all [return] type bye
Good luck.
On Apr 6, 2005, at 2:22 PM, Thomas Baker wrote:
I've been running X (10.3.8 now) trouble-free for months, but today I
decided to change the cables on my video converter box (which I use to feed
analog video into Final Cut), and I thought it would be safer to shut down
the computer before switching FireWire or video cables on the box (I
especially worry about switching FW cables hot). So I chose Shut Down and
waited for the Mac to shut down. The monitor screen turned blank-blue as it
usually does during shutdown, but then it just hung there, frozen. No
shut-down.
After waiting awhile, I decided to go ahead and shut the Mac down the rest
of the way by just hitting the Off button on my APS power backup, which
cuts off the power to the Mac. Dumb! Doing that apparently broke OS-X!
(Unless it was already broken when the shutdown screen froze).
Now when I try to start up the Mac, instead of going to the OS-X desktop,
it goes to a login box with my name on it, but only for a couple of
seconds. Then that box vanishes and I get a blue screen with a terminal
command line in the upper left corner: a login prompt asking for name and
password. So I give it those, and I get "Welcome to Darwin!" Who's Darwin?
Charles Darwin the naturalist? Anyway there sits the prompter or whatever
it is waiting for commands, and I don't know any commands to give. The only
command I know is "exit," which starts the whole broken startup thing over
again: the glimpse of a login box followed by the terminal command lines
asking for name and password again.
I looked into Pogue's OS-X book for help, and he says to boot into single
user mode in such a situation and type in fsck -y to get a repair routine
running. So I did that, and I get
"Checking HFS Plus Volume Invalid number of allocation blocks (-1,0) **volume check failed"
Hitting exit from there takes me right back to "Welcome to Darwin" again. A
vicious circle! No way out!
Pogue suggests that when everything else fails like this, reinstall OS-X.
So I put my OS-X CD in the superdrive (Pioneer 107) and restart while
holding down the C key, but it hangs at the gray screen with the apple on
it. I have to force a restart.
Fortunately this is a dual-boot G4 (733 DA), so I can drop back into OS
9.2.2 by re-starting and holding down the D key. That gives me the OS-9
desktop (and I am sending this cry for help to the G-list from it) and I
can see all my drive icons, and open them up to see that everything on them
is present and accounted for (three internal and IDE three external
FireWire drives), and the OS-X System folder is sitting there on one of the
drives as normal.
While on the OS-9 desktop, if I choose the OS-X Install disk as the startup
disk, and restart, all it does is hang again at the gray screenfd, and I
have to force a restart.
So, I'm stuck! I can't get my OS-X desktop back, and I can't reinstall OS-X
either! What do I do now?
Tom
Art website at http://www.ThomasBakerPaintings.com Archaeology website at http://www.nmia.com/~jaybird/AANewsletter/
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