Desktop not loading at all

Tinpusher

Tinpusher

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I've tried everything listed on http://www.apple.com/support/mac101/help/2/#7, but none of that worked.

I've run the Apple Hardware Test CD, that showed no fault found.

Basically, my G4 (running 10.2.8) starts up fine then freezes when it gets to one screen being Aqua (the normal desktop) and the other screen being plain blue (not the normal desktop for that screen)- see attachment.

The only change I made in between the machine being able to start normally, loggin me in automatically, and this happening was the following:

1. I disabled Automatic Login for me. Not sure if this "went through" OK.
2. I attempted to create another user account, but the system froze so I forced quit on the System Preferences.

If there is no easy fix for this, I am ***perfectly*** happy to format the HD and start all over again. I've only had the machine a couple of weeks, and most of the data on my HD is duplicated from my PC anyway. There are only 1 or 2 unique files that I'd be disappointed to lose.
 

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Just tried zapping the PRAM (?) (Opt-Alt-P-R on startup?), waited for 4 chimes and still the same.

Seriously thinking about reformatting the HD and starting all over again.
 
Have you tried booting up in safe mode by rebooting and holding down the shift key until you see the Apple logo?
 
I've had the same issues as well on a couple of my G5's running Tiger. Booting into safe mode allowed me access to the machines, but I could not find anything wrong. The normal user account would exhibit the behavior, but any other account would work just fine. I used Cocktail to clean out all of the caches, rebooted, and everything worked as normal.
 
I can't load anything. The machine boots to the screens shown in the thumbnail above, and then... nothing. Nada.

No login options, no desktop. And Safe Mode doesn't load properly.

Something is seriously wrong here....
 
That doesn't give me an option to boot OS9. I've got the OSX CD in the drive, though- would that have something to do with it?
 
I'm guessing your G4 is the older PCI model and not an AGP or newer. That would be why the Option key won't work.

Boot off the OS X disc and see if there's an option under one of the menus to change the startup disk.
 
It's 2002 vintage, I believe. I am booting at this moment off the OSX disk, and have selected a repair installation (archiving network settings etc etc). If this doesn't work, format HD it is!

I'm not that worried about formatting the HD, losing a couple of files and putting all the software back on there. It's just that I want to be able to learn the nuts and bolts of the system so that I can learn how to fix problems myself.
 
If your machine supports booting to OS 9 (the newest Macs don't) and if you have a proper OS 9 System Folder in place, then OS 9 will be a boot option from the "Startup Disk" system preference.

Have you tried booting into single-user mode and running fsck yet?
 
"the volume Macintosh HD appears to be OK"....

I type "reboot". And we're still back to where we were at the beginning. Left screen- aqua, right screen- plain blue.

My housemate is an IT professional, and he remarked that it's basically missing a login screen. I'm a bit dubious about changing the screens around, because I recall something about one screen being digital and the other analogue. At any rate, one is powered off the normal monitor output and the other one is powered off a ?serial? port, through a black box that takes a mains input and gives out a monitor output and a USB cable. That bit of the system is a complete mystery to me.
 
One thing to try might be to press command-option-escape and see if the "Force Quit Applications" window comes up somewhere, and if it does, whether the Finder is listed as running.

One other remote possibility is to mount the drive as a firewire drive (assuming that you have another Mac handy) and move aside some of the preference files, like com.apple.finder.plist. But this might be more trouble than it's worth, if reformatting and reinstalling is not really a problem for you.
 
We've just tried the mounting via firewire thing. Startup pressing T, the firewire screen comes up on my G4 but the drive never mounts on the other mac (also a G4, not sure which version of OSX it's running though).

Next thing I will be trying is to recover the files I want to keep via the UNIX screen and transferring them onto a USB memory stick.

I'll also give that command-option-escape thing a go as well. Does that normally work when the only dialogue displayed is the login screen?
 
Right, I'm giving up on the idea of loading a USB memory stick- it's beyond me.

Going back to the plan of loading up OS9, because I do want to save some of the data on the HD (or at least have a jolly good crack at it). Starting up holding OPT gives me OSX on the HD, and nothing else.

Is there anything else I can try to get my G4 to boot up in OS9?
 
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