10.2 locks on start-up

R

rowcroft

Registered
I have installed 10.2 and it was working great through 3 or 4 reboots, and then I rebooted a minute ago and it comes up with the grey screen and apple logo but after a minute there is garble horizontally through the middle of the screen and it locks up. Any ideas? Here's the system:

G4 450
ATI 8500 video
1GB RAM
80GB Maxtor drive

I did an upgrade from 10.1.5 as well- thanks in advance!

Rowcroft
 
I'd try to zap the pram. Just incase...:

Restart your computer.
Hold down these keys: option+apple+"P"+"R"
Do this until your machine chimes 4 times. This should do the trick!
 
Well, I zapped the PRAM and heard four tones. Let go and the system booted to a grey screen with a stuck cursor in the upper left hand corner. Now what? Thanks,

Eric Rowcroft
 
Sounds pretty bad as lock-ups go. You ought to start in single-user mode (hold down command-s at startup) and run the "fsck" command (file-system check) like so:

fsck -y

When this is done enter the command "reboot" and press return.

If the system still won't boot then try booting the original CD and see what utilities are available in the installer's menu bar. You should at least be able to run Disk Utility. Make sure to run the "fix file permissions" repair in Disk Utility in addition to the regular disk repair.

It sounds to me as if the system may have been unintentionally damaged during one of your previous successful sessions. Did you muck about in the Terminal at all? You have to be very careful not to delete things or change permissions on files in the root folder. Your boot symptom could also indicate a bad preferences file but I think this is less likely the way you describe it.

If all else fails just install Jaguar on top of the existing install and cross your fingers.

(Incidentally zapping the PRAM resets your startup disk. Try holding down the option key at startup to choose the startup volume.)
 
Thanks for the tips, I went ahead and booted to the 10.2 cd and wiped the hard drive of two partitions (one OS 9 and one OS X) and made one large partition that I am installing OS X.2 on right now. We'll see how it goes. This is my first foray into Apple's in 6 years, been a Solaris and windows admin the last 5. Talk about a change!


Rowcroft
 
Yeah, when Amazon finally delivers my Jaguar I'm going to do a total clean-install. It's the only way to guarantee that small problems don't cause Jaguar to flip out.

The real fun will be reinstalling MySQL and my dozen or so Virtual Hosts under Apache. Although past experience has shown this to be a smooth and painless process when you pay attention throughout!

PS - Welcome to the Mac. This OS is pretty darn amazing.
 
Luckily, this workstation didn't have anything critical on it, I've been playing with it and now that I have 10.2 I'm getting it ready for another worker and ordering a dual 867 system- that is, if I can get this system up and running successfully!
 
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