Booting Problems

unlearnthetruth

unlearnthetruth

Recycle Me!
So I have an iMac, running 9.2, and everything was working fine, I shut down, went to sleep... thats it... Anyway, I went to turn it on when I got back and before it gets to login, a bomb comes up with error 127, which is apparently an HFS filesystem error... DFA and has no result... any ideas?
 
c'mon, you know the answer to this one. ;)

launch from disc and run a repair program on your system disk. you might even start with mac's own disk first aid.
 
yeah thats what i thought, and tried, but disk first aid didn't find anything wrong with it.... this isn't my comp it's a friend's i'm troubleshooting by phone, and she has no other utilities available at present... :rolleyes:
 
i thought that was a little simple for you to be asking. i hope you sent her to the store as soon as it opens if you didn't get if figured out. unless there is more you are not telling us like that it has osx installed or she just installed some program or added a drive or ....well, you know.
 
hehe, not that i know of... she tells me this long-winded story about how she was using it normally, then went home for the weekend, did this and that at home, had a good time, blah blah blah, then came back, and it wouldn't work... my guess is that she's leaving out something, but i dunno :rolleyes: No OSX, it's just 9.2... She said a friend has DiscWarrior so I told her to find it and run that a few times. I'm just a little surprised, because I would have thought Disk First Aid would have picked up a problem if the OS was reporting an HFS error... oh well, i'll hear more about it 2morrow, my friend got "too impatient to deal with my computer talk" and gave up for the night... tsk tsk... kids... ;) ;)
 
so what happens if she boots without extensions on?

rather than reformat, do a clean install of os 9 and see if it will boot from that (you remember, use the control panel to choose the startup system - might have to launch from a disk to access it)

if it boots under either of the conditions i describe then we can assume that something in her original system file was somehow corrupted. if she has roommates, i'm guessing somebody played with it while she was away or else she left it on and the power went out. regardless, if the clean install works, then she needs to move prfs and additional extensions, control panels etc. back a few at a time till she finds the culprit. this is almost as much work as reformatting but at least you don't need to backup every little thing.
 
well when the error comes up it suggests she boots w/o extensions... she does, but the same thing happens. She's being horribly uncooperative, but I think she's going to go to the tech support center at her school (Fordham is one of the few schools that admits Mac's exist... i wish mine did...) and see if they can let her try other disk utilities or whatever. As you said, my next idea was telling her to re-install the OS, but I didn't think that would help due to the nature of the error, worth a try though I suppose. .....girls..... heh....
 
he he

yes, my gf believes that computers should never break and if they do, they should fix themselves. one should never have to get a man involved in the process. :rolleyes: :p

i think this is the one area in which they hate to 'ask directions':D

but to see a little of their point - we usually do start speaking a foriegn language to them at that point;)
 
Well, my gf believes that problems only happen on her machine when I come near it, and she's adamant that computers have personalities. (Adamant to a disturbing degree, we've actually gotten into a fight about it twice. In my book something that relies solely on an on-off instruction will not have a personality. And yes, a human is an "on-off" instruction set just as much as a computer, but fortunately we're performing trillions of on-offs a second, while a computer is still stuck doing a few hundred thousands a second if it's a super computer. Last I checked big blue wasn't called big blue due to depression... Anyway...) Back on point.

Did she zap the PRAM, did she shut down the computer unplug it, and then hit the power button? (Sounds weird, but for some weird reason the power drain on the boards must kick it. Either that or the machine just wants to go to sleep without interruption. We all know how cranky computers get after being up two hours past their bed time.)
:rolleyes:

Good luck, I know where you are getting frustrated. Sounds like every day at work for me. :(
 
ok so get this.... we did a clean install of the system folder, which moved all the old stuff to "original files." So i tell the girl to salvage any prefs or extensions, and then to delete the old system folder. Jen, in her haste, deleted the "original files" folder..... and ended up trashing everything.... She yelled at me...... a lot..... but at least her computer works!

End result: a clean install solved the problem :rolleyes:
 
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