Imac won't start totally

[tjwright]

I went out of town and daughter chose to use my computer. She attempted to
install some sort of chat software. Now the computer goes to apple and spinner. After a few minutes of that it turns itself off.

The bluetooth keyboard works because I ejected a disk with it. But holding down the shift key does not produce "safe mode" start.

How can I get in there and fix it?

Thanks

 

[ra3ndy]

If you have the Restore DVD that came with your mac, follow these instructions that I copied from here:

Try Disk Utility
• Insert the Mac OS X Install disc that came with your computer, then restart the computer while holding the C key.
• When your computer finishes starting up from the disc, choose Disk Utility from the Installer menu. (In Mac OS X 10.4 or later, you must select your language first.)
• Important: Do not click Continue in the first screen of the Installer. If you do, you must restart from the disc again to access Disk Utility.
• Click the First Aid tab.
• Click the disclosure triangle to the left of the hard drive icon to display the names of your hard disk volumes and partitions.
• Select your Mac OS X volume.
• Click Repair. Disk Utility checks and repairs the disk.

I would add to these instructions that you should also click the "Repair Permissions" button while you're in here, which is also a likely culprit to your problem.

ANOTHER NOTE: If you're running an updated version of your OS (say your bought your Mac with 10.4, but upgraded to 10.5) then use the disk that matches the system version installed on your Mac.

If you don't have your disk, then shame on you, but you can still attempt to repair your disk (though you can't repair permissions):
Boot your Mac while holding down Command+S. This should boot you into Single User Mode, which is a black screen with a bunch of white text.

Once it's done loading, type fsck -fy and hit enter. This will run a file system check on your hard drive to identify any problems there. If it finishes and reports that something was fixed, run it again until it says "Volume appears to be ok".

Good luck!

 

[nixgeek]

To add, after you've done the fsck -fy command and found that there are no errors, type reboot to restart the Mac.