Log in error

[MHPb]

Hi there,

A work colleague is running 10.4.10 on a 1.6 G5 and had a big crash earlier today whilst working in Illustrator CS2 from her desktop after copying a pile of stuff from our server. Everything slowed right down, the beachball turned up and span for ages whilst entourage tried to synch with the exchange server. then everything froze and she held the power button to switch it off and reboot.

Now when logging into her user the screen loads the plain blue background and only the spotlight button at the top right of the screen and hangs there without drawing the rest of the top bar.

Any ideas how to fix this?

 

[michaelsanford]

This is an educated guess, but you should try booting from the MacOS X Install DVD (or CD, whichever you have) and running Disk Utility in the OS installer application (it is available in the menu bar).

Try to Repair the affected disks (don't bother with Verify), then Repair Permissions, then try to boot again.

If you do not have the install DVD readily available, you can also try to boot into single-user mode (by holding Apple and S while powering on) and issuing 'fsck -yf' to (hopefully) repair the volume.

I have heard rumours that trying fsck on a journaled volume can be dangerous, but I've done it many, many times with no ill-effect. This is assuming, though, that that user account doesn't have FileVault enabled...