Hi guys,
I have the following problem:
I wonder if you good people can help me, i know its not strictly a BSD problem, but i feel like i need the help of a linux boffin. I have a 2 year old imac that was working fine until last night running OSX Leopard.
When i booted my computer last night i got to my desktop but instead of seeing my usual 3 partitions (macintosh, home, windows xp) I only saw 2 - windows xp was missing. Not only this but my system was continuously beachballing.
I was unable to force quit so after a few minutes i held in the power button for 4 seconds until it shut down. Upon reboot, i was (and still am) only able to get to the white screen with apple logo that you get on boot up. On this screen you have a little gear spinning round. This spins for some time then just as my computer would usually boot into the O/S, the gear stops and it hangs.
Please can anyone offer me any help with this? So far i have:
Tried diagnostics mode - all diagnostics come back ok, even in extended test
Single user mode - tried FSCK to repair, first time it made changes to drive, after that nothing.
Tried safe mode - wont boot
Tried booting from leopard cd - still hangs in same place
tried booting from tiger on an external hdd - at same place it usually hangs, it kernel panics instead
swapped ram out - exactly the same problem when using someone elses ram
Im out of ideas, any help would really be appreciated. Thanks so much in advance and sorry for such a long first post. I am a regular reader or macrumors, just havent been to the forums before.
Many thanks again
hardtofin
update:
I have removed the video drivers and caches in single user mode. My computer now boots although has no quartz support and has no 3d acceleration.
I still however can not boot from a CD to put a fresh install of OS X on. Do you guys think this was the fault, just bad files in caches, or could it still be hardware?
what i did was as follows in "single user mode":
/sbin/mount -uw /
cd /system/library/extensions
rm -r NVDA*
rm -r ATI*
rm -r GeForce*
any opinions appreciated, and thanks in advance for your help on a problem which i know is not strictly BSD.
thanks,
hardtofin
I have the following problem:
I wonder if you good people can help me, i know its not strictly a BSD problem, but i feel like i need the help of a linux boffin. I have a 2 year old imac that was working fine until last night running OSX Leopard.
When i booted my computer last night i got to my desktop but instead of seeing my usual 3 partitions (macintosh, home, windows xp) I only saw 2 - windows xp was missing. Not only this but my system was continuously beachballing.
I was unable to force quit so after a few minutes i held in the power button for 4 seconds until it shut down. Upon reboot, i was (and still am) only able to get to the white screen with apple logo that you get on boot up. On this screen you have a little gear spinning round. This spins for some time then just as my computer would usually boot into the O/S, the gear stops and it hangs.
Please can anyone offer me any help with this? So far i have:
Tried diagnostics mode - all diagnostics come back ok, even in extended test
Single user mode - tried FSCK to repair, first time it made changes to drive, after that nothing.
Tried safe mode - wont boot
Tried booting from leopard cd - still hangs in same place
tried booting from tiger on an external hdd - at same place it usually hangs, it kernel panics instead
swapped ram out - exactly the same problem when using someone elses ram
Im out of ideas, any help would really be appreciated. Thanks so much in advance and sorry for such a long first post. I am a regular reader or macrumors, just havent been to the forums before.
Many thanks again
hardtofin
update:
I have removed the video drivers and caches in single user mode. My computer now boots although has no quartz support and has no 3d acceleration.
I still however can not boot from a CD to put a fresh install of OS X on. Do you guys think this was the fault, just bad files in caches, or could it still be hardware?
what i did was as follows in "single user mode":
/sbin/mount -uw /
cd /system/library/extensions
rm -r NVDA*
rm -r ATI*
rm -r GeForce*
any opinions appreciated, and thanks in advance for your help on a problem which i know is not strictly BSD.
thanks,
hardtofin