Stuck at blue screen

[ascomycota]

When I turned my iMac on this morning (iMac G5 PPC 10.5.8) it went through all of the "normal" steps (gong, grey screen, apple logo, progress wheel, blue screen) and stopped at the blue screen. Thinking it was just a fluke, I shut the machine down and restarted, only to have it stop at the blue screen again.

After disconnecting everything going into the iMac except the keyboard and mouse, I attempted to boot into safe mode but it stopped at the blue screen again.

Next, I flashed the PRAM (big gong, single quieter gong) and afterwards it came to the blue screen.

I reattached my external drive and selected to boot from a 2-day old backup. Using the backup I was able to log into both my regular account and my "test" account (without login items).

I still cannot login (except to my external drive backup). Any ideas?

[Natobasso]

Boot up with your os x system disk on your computer and initiate a repair permissions (don't reinstall os x just yet).

Reboot and let us know if your computer gets past the blue screen. Though you might need to do an archive and install in order to get things working again: http://discussions.apple.com/thread....11511&tstart=0

[ascomycota]

Thanks Natobasso,

My optical drive is kaput, but I ran DiskWarrior last night (via firewire from my MacBook) to repair permissions but was not able to get past the blue screen afterwards.

I have my bootable backup on my external drive (via SuperDuper) and hope that it can make a reinstall easier (if needed).

[Natobasso]

Ooh, don't use Disk Warrior. I've heard of many issues cropping up because of that app - it's a bit out of date and doesn't handle mac permissions as well as it should.

Boot in Single User mode and run a repair from there:
http://thesalon.blogspot.com/2009/05...user-mode.html

[Doctor X]

Depends on which version of DiskWarrior you are using--there is a new one available.

Be that as it may have you tried booting from the system disk via your other computer to you sick one?

--J.D.