10.4.2 Blue Screen of Death - keyboard doesn't affect boot sequence

hammer32

Registered
I've got a G4 DP450 Mac OS 10.4.2 system with an external FireWire drive that showed no issues until yesterday evening. Mouse and keyboard froze, had to force reboot.

I get the "Mac OS X starting up..." progress bar in the white box but it completes way to fast, then I'm left with a blue screen and a mouse cursor.

Holding down keyboard combinations during force reboots does nothing (so no single user boot, no safe mode boot, no boot from Tiger DVD...). Not sure what to do with this computer since the keyboard (Apple USB, wired) won't allow me to change the boot sequence at all.

Apple has a knowledge base article on the blue screen, but it assumes that the computer accepts input from the keyboard (tested keyboard on three other systems, no problems there).

Anyone else see anything like this before? Is there anything to try besides pulling drives?
 
You could also go into Single User Mode and follow the directions listed to run a check on the hard drive. The key combo is Command-Option-S.
 
Or, try booting into safe mode: hold down the "Shift" key and keep it held down immediately after booting. This will force a disk check among other maintenance procedures and may find something to fix.

Also, a more thorough disk check can be done by booting from the OS X Install CD and selecting "Disk Utility" from the Installer menu, then running a "Repair Disk" on the boot drive.

Just out of left field, is your keyboard attached directly to the computer, or through a hub of some sort?
 
ElDiabloConCaca said:
Or, try booting into safe mode: hold down the "Shift" key and keep it held down immediately after booting. This will force a disk check among other maintenance procedures and may find something to fix.

Also, a more thorough disk check can be done by booting from the OS X Install CD and selecting "Disk Utility" from the Installer menu, then running a "Repair Disk" on the boot drive.

Just out of left field, is your keyboard attached directly to the computer, or through a hub of some sort?

The keyboard is directly connected (originally it was connected through a KVM, but I've stripped it down to original spec troubleshooting it). I've tried all of the above, the commands seem to be ignored by this system. I'll try zapping the PRAM this evening.

Thanks,

Sean
 
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