startup requests registration and hangs

D

dicty2

Registered
I have an old powerbook g4 (original ti model) running osx 10.3.9. Yesterday I got a "harddisk almost full" warning message although just checking the disk using command-i showed there was still quite a bit of space available (disk is 20GB). This morning on rebooting it gets as far as "starting login screen" then hangs a long time then shows a black osx "getting started" screen which runs some music then asks me to "register my product". (I don't remember ever seeing this before even when I originally installed the system). The screen asks me to give my .mac name or register for .mac or not register then press "continue". It doesn't matter which option I choose, just nothing happens, even after more than 2 hours. Same thing happens starting in safe mode. I also tried /sbin/fsck -y and got a message that it had repaired a node (?) but that hasn't solved the problem. Help please!
 
Hm. The warning of the disk being almost full is not to be taken lightly. What is "quite a bit of space"? (20 GB is the whole disk, not what's free...) If we're talking less than 1 GB, then you _have_ to free up some space.
 
I looked at disk space using DU from the install disk and there's only 595MB so I guess you are right. But I still can't start up because of this cursed "register your product" problem! Any clues as what's causing this? Thanks.
 
Well, that looks like a fresh Mac OS X installation... This comes up right after installing OS X. Did you do so?
 
Yes, I had a suspicion it would need that. I'm going to try and rescue some recently updated files using target mode before doing the reinstall. Solves the problem of what to do with the weekend.... Thanks for the advice. Dicty.
 
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