Flashing earth icon, cannot left click, dock gone, Menu drop-downs are all blank.

M

Michael Knight

Registered
When I turn on my Powerbook G4 (1.5 GHz) 15" a little Earth icon flashes about 15x. Then a small question mark flashes followed by the Mac smiley face icon. They alternate flashing about a dozen times or so.
My computer then goes to the grey-on-grey Apple logo screen, then to the password login screen. I enter password and successfully get to my desktop, HOWEVER:
(1)the font on my menu bar seems to have changed. No big deal?
(2)The menu bar is incomplete as I'm missing my internet signal indicator
(3)My dock is completely gone. Cannot find it anywhere.
(4)I have desktop icons but cannot left click on any of them. When I do I just get a long blank white colored rectangle. When I roll cursor over it it turns blue. Still blank though!
(5)This is the same with the menu bar. When I click on anything (Finder, File, Edit, View, etc) the drop down menu is just blank empty space.

I probably have only 1 GB of memory left. Could this be a contributing factor?
Thank You
 
That means it is looking for a Home folder severed on a server. Power off and boot while holding down the 'option' key to select your internal version of OS X.
 
Be sure to select the boot system in your Startup Disk preference pane.

If you run really low on hard drive space, you will get messages telling you that 'you are running low on space' or something similar. Have you recently seen any messages like that? They will simply pop up on the screen while you are working, so you don't need to check in system logs or anything like that.
 
I started the computer holding the option key. The screen read Welcome to open Firmware. To continue booting type "mac-boot" and press return. To shut down type "shut down" etc, etc... When I rebooted I was back where I was before.

I also started computer holding down Shift key. Exactly the same options and results as above.

I also located my startup disk and selected "Network Startup" to start up the computer. Hit "Restart", and still no luck.

and Yes, I have been receiving "low on space" messages this week.
 
Last edited:
From startup disk just tried to Restart computer using the other option- "Mac OS X, 10.4.11 on Macintosh HD".
That still hasn't done the trick.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top