boot to darwin?

M

mwwhonda

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the machine is a dual G4 500Mhz machine w/ 1GB of ram. it has both os 9 and os x loaded. this machine does not belong to myself, it is a client here at work.

no one here really has any formal apple education or really knows their way around the machines. i am a novice user and am the only person onsite willing to touch the apple machines we have here.

yesterday the user was downloading a file and walked away from the machine (i do not suspect the file to be a virus, it was coming from a reputable source, additionally virus applications are installed on the machine). when the user returned the computer was sitting at a black console like screen. when i was called down the machine was sitting at a blue screen with a turning gear.

i shut the machine down, tryed zapping the pram and making sure the machine was set to boot from the correct partition.

the boot sequence goes like this.

the machine powers up fine and begins the os x boot sequence. it loads the blue screen with the white box and it starts the normal activities as the bar starts to move from left to right. all of a sudden the white box disapears, however the gear continues to turn near the bottom of the screen. the screen then goes black and says "Darwin/BSD etc... (console)"

it asks for a login. if i enter a user and password it then says "Welcome to Darwin!".

what to do from here is beyond me!

PLEASE HELP!
 
Darwin is the Unix layer that underlies OS X. I'm not sure what's causing you to boot that way though.

Try typing reboot(enter)

IF that doesn't work, try sudo reboot (enter) then enter an admin password. See if it comes up into OS X then.
 
i have run fsck after booting into single user mode, norton disk utility and disk utility from the cds. norton found numerous errors and so did disk utility but they all seem to be cleared up. i will try the reboot command in conjuction with sudo as the reboot command alone prompted the same behavior.
 
The program that shows the graphical login window is at /System/Library/CoreServices/loginwindow

You can try to run it directly from the console window with
sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/loginwindow.app/Contents/MacOS/loginwindow

If it doesn't work, it might still print some useful error messages...
 
after the "welcome to darwin" shows up, type exit - this should boot to the login screen.


mwwhonda said:
it asks for a login. if i enter a user and password it then says "Welcome to Darwin!".

what to do from here is beyond me!

PLEASE HELP!
Click to expand...
 
you may want to try booting from a OSX install CD and repairng permissions on the system volume.
 
It looks like something's wrong with your boot routine (that may seem kind of obvious but what I'm saying is it's likely not an NVRAM issue since it displays the boot window at first and doesn't boot with text alone). For information's sake though, you can issue sudo /usr/sbin/nvram -p and copy/paste the information here, it might provide some insight.

That blue screen with a turning gear is displayed while the machine shuts down (or prepares to reboot) and is displayed if the user chooses to shutdown/reboot from the Apple menu or uses /sbin/shutdown from the terminal, locally or remotely (could be useful information to you).

You can repair permissions from the console using
sudo /usr/sbin/diskutil repairPermissions /

How did you select the correct boot partition ? Did you boot from the Mac OS X installer CD ? You can also choose a system folder at boot time by holding down the OPTION key.

You may also wish to boot holding down COMMAND-V which will boot to "verbose mode" displaying all the kernel messages while it boots. If you're at all familiar with BSD it may be very useful to you, particularly the last messages if there are errors concerning loginwindow.

PS Congratulations on having the courage to look at a Mac, it's ont as daunting as your colleagues think, is it :p
 
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