Major startup problems

gcoyne

Registered
Last week when I was starting up I would get the happy Mac, followed by the spinning pizza in the upper left, and then instead of the screen blinking to the blue screen for the rest of the startup process, it went to white. I could hear the HD spin for a bit longer, but nothing.

Some extra information: I had a problem with a DS_Store file just prior to this event (the night before)--I had to restart in OS 9 to transfer a file to a zip disk. It was when I restarted after this event did I have the problem.

I have a 2nd partition on this disk. I installed OS X on this partition and then tried to reinstall it to see what might be lost. It was then I discovered that you cannot reinstall OS X without zeroing out the partition. I did and it worked fine. Then I back up my data onto an external HD (firewire), and reinstalled OS X on the main partition. [As a side note, during the instillation process, something happened on the external drive and all data was lost--fortunately, all important files were backed up at home so no major loss.

Anyhow, it worked fine that day (last Friday). As of today, when I came in both partitions have the original problem. I can start up off a CD (Installer). I have ran Disk 10, Diskwarrior, Norton, and Tech Tool.

As per reccomendations from others, I have deleted all the DS_Store files from both partitions, blasted the pRAM, and started up with the Command-s keys pressed and ran a thing called "fsck -y" twice till no errors were observed.

I still cannot start up in OS X.

Please please please, if anyone has any ideas please contact me directly <gcoyne@calstatela.edu> for any suggestions you may have. I'm not inclined to do another re-install as I just did that to no avail.

Thanks for any help,

Gary
 
you don't list your mac specs and peripherals anywhere but try booting without any peripherals but the keyboard and mouse.
 
Originally posted by Ed Spruiell
you don't list your mac specs and peripherals anywhere but try booting without any peripherals but the keyboard and mouse.

Sorry, I was so busy listing all other specs, I forgot that one.

G3 B&W, 350.

I do (did) have some SCSI things pluged in, but they haven't effected anything to date. But to make sure I did unplug them (I turned the computer off first). I did leave the monitor plugged in.

Thanks for the thoughts, but still no luck. :>(

Any other thoughts out there?

Help?

Gary
 
I'm not sure what kind of progress OS X has made yet, but I know at least with some original os X installs, even having the scsi CARD installed would cause it to hang. Seeing as you can start from the cd, this seems less likely, but its something to consider.
 
Try using command-v at startup to see a verbose listing of the startup process and see if you can determine when it stalls.

Sometimes my macs have stalled is when using DHCP for networking and not being able to find a network.
 
will your computer start up in 9? i had a similar problem, and found that if i start up in 9, and restart in 10, it runs fine. i haven't had any problems yet (i just did it today, and it's working fine... for the time being)

kerisbf
 
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