Please help.... boot problems

G

Gage0004

Registered
Hey guys, what's going on? I'm new here to the forums. My cousin recently got one of those iMac Cinema 20 inch setups (I think g4 or higher) and she's the type of person who loads every c.d. she owns on itunes along with video etc and tons of unneccesary stuff to the point where its ridiculous. Anyway, she told me her machine froze when she tried to turn it on this morning... It would go through the apple screen with the grey background and the circle spinning and then to the blue screen and start to load and freeze. Needless to say I figured she may have overloaded it so I offered to help fix it. I brought the computer to my house and had the same problem; I get through the opening image of the apple logo then it proceeds to the blue screen and freezes as it starts to load. I let it sit forever and then held in the power button to restart it. It continues and will not load.

At one point it did load successful and a dialogue box said it needed to restart to finish the updates she installed; so before I restarted it, I viewed the info of her hard drive. She has a space capacity of something close to 240 gigs and she's got about 43 free. I know its quite sad lol. Anyway, if anyone knows how to fix this please reply as soon as possible. I don't even want to bother with it but I'd rather just be able to fix it now and clear out her movies/songs/uneccesary programs than have her continue to bug me. I tried command prompts as it wouldnt load and tried resetting the P-Ram etc... and nothing seemed to work. I'm going to try and get her software disc of Mac OS X and see if I put it in before I restart if it will load and allow me to format or fix the problem. Any help would be appreciated as I am also new to the Mac itself and love it, but have never needed to fix any serious problems like this on my own Powerbook. Please help... Thanks
-Steve
 
O.K. I first will point you to this Apple document. You should follow this directions (as they pertain to you).

Then I will tell you that ANY computer a person gets should immediately reformatted with the system disks. This will help over the life of the Mac/Windows machine.

Now in OS X machines, system disks will shipped with the machine. You will need these disks to do some trouble shooting or reformatting. Find the first system disk and try to start from it (by holding down the "c" key during startup). Once the installer starts up, go to the top menu and use the drop down menus to find Disk Utility. From Disk Utility try to Repair Permissions and Repair Disk. If this does not help, a reformat should happen.

If you have to reformat, good luck. Lastly you should speak to your cousin about the dangers of doing what your cousin is doing. Also OS X is is not bullet proof and need maintenance during the life of the machine. A little freeware application called Yasu that will do all the "maintenance" tasks that needs to done on an OS X machine. This "maintenance" should be run about every two weeks to keep the Mac running like a champ.

Now if you have to reformat, updating can almost be done in one fell swoop . Once a base OS X is put into the Mac, go to Apple downloads and get the latest 10.4.6 (the latest OS X) Combo Update (be careful to get the one for either the PPC chip or Intel chip. The Combo update will move any OS X machine 10.4.x to 10.4.6 (or the latest OS X) to the the latest OS X edition, will the current security updates. Then after the Combo update runs, launch Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility) and run "Repair Permissions. Then run Software Update and let all the most current updates come down. Then run Disk Utility again and "Repair Permissions" yet again. Then teach your cousin to do this after most any big software load onto his/her Mac. This will keep OS X and strait and narrow.

Lastly either tell your cousin to get the book OS X, The Missing Manual. It is an easy read and very informative to any new Mac user. After reading this your cousin will have a good leap forward in understanding the Mac. IMHO the book will stop all the calls forward to you because your cousin will have a really good grip on running the OS X machine.

Now if your cousin wants to download a whole bunch of videos, a firewire external drive may be in order. I say this because OS X is based on BSD Unix and Unix needs some free space (about 5 % of the startup disk) for a "Swap" file Unix needs for operation. IMHO a great place to get a firewire disk is from OWC. I say this because they are rock steady and include all cables when you buy the disk.

Good Luck in your trouble shooting.
 
Thanks for your help... Worked beautifully and unfortunately had to reformat, but I think my cousin learned her lesson. Thanks
 
There is nothing wrong with her loading all of her music and videos onto her computer. The way a Mac orgainizes one's music and video is one of its greatest features. If she is running low on space, then I recommend upgrading to a larger drive or getting an external drive.

Good Luck!
 
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