update killed my ibook... help?

[lionsweb]

Hi -
I'm having an issue. I think it happened because my ibook (first white one, 500mhz g3) ran out of juice while it was optimizing the hard drive from an update.
Now when I turn on the ibook, I get the normal startup.. the normal bar where things are loading... but as soon as that finishes, I have just the plan background color that shows before the background image loads, and my mouse pointer. nothing else. And it stays that way. The pointer does move, for whatever that's worth. Anyone have any ideas that don't involve reinstalling OSX? I can't remember if I have any data there I need to back up....

 

[ElDiabloConCaca]

As a good rule of thumb, it's wise never to run a system update while running on battery power, nor during rainstorms. The optimization process is required and should not be interrupted for any reason. Updates can always wait -- they're not so important that they can't wait until the 'book gets plugged in.

You can try booting into single-user mode (command - s while starting up) and then running the fsck routine, after which you might try to repair the prebindings (the things that are modified during the "optimization" process) by typing "sudo update_prebindings -root / -force".

Also, if you've got DiskWarrior or Drive 10 or something laying around, you may wanna try booting from that CD and repairing the drive. You can also do a repair by booting from the Mac OS X Install Disk 1 CD and selecting "Open Disk Utility" from the "File" menu when you're prompted and then selecting the repair disk option.

I hope that gets you back up and running soon!

 

[lionsweb]

You can try booting into single-user mode (command - s while starting up) and then running the fsck routine, after which you might try to repair the prebindings (the things that are modified during the "optimization" process) by typing "sudo update_prebindings -root / -force".

Thanks... I got into single user mode, ran fsck, did nothing, followed the instructions for making the disk no longer read only, ran fsck, it did something with some temporary files and pronounced me clean... still same problem on boot. Went back into single user mode, did the same thing, it cleaned up the same files (I think), tried to run update_prebindings... no such command. singular worked though... update_prebinding... but it wouldn't complete, it gave an error message which I should have written down, but didn't. Anything else I can try there before booting to CD and probably wiping the drive?

And point taken on the battery thing. I actually fell asleep reading whie it was getting the backup and I think when I set it down to run it came unplugged... and of course the blasted thing only has about 50 minutes of battery life now (which is weird because it was like 2 - 2.5 when I was still on jaguar a few months ago) so it died pretty quickly.