My MAC won't finish booting. Help!?

Question

I know nothing about Mac's and got this one free from a friend. It's a G4 running 10.4. All of a sudden one day I turn it on and it begins to boot up, but right as it gets to the screen where the blue bar loads across in the white window (I don't know what you guys call that), it removes that white window and just the blue screen remains. It will go back between displaying a cursor and the little loading dial near the bottom of the screen in an infinite loop. That is where it gets stuck.

I tried resetting the button near the battery, no luck. Please help in laments terms, as I do not know anything about Macs. Tanks!

Answer 1

The screen you're talking about is the loginwindow. Does your friend have a Mac too? If so, here's what I'd try. Boot up your Mac into target disk mode by holding down "T" when you turn it on. Hold it until you see the bouncing firewire icon. Use a firewire cable to connect your Mac to your friend's. Your Mac's hard drive should show up on your friend's Desktop with an orange firewire drive icon. Double-click that icon to bring up a Finder window of your drive's contents, and drag these files to the Trash:
/ Library / Preferences / com.apple.loginwindow.plist
/ Library / Preferences / loginwindow.plist
/ Users / (your_user_name) / Library / Preferences / com.apple.loginwindow.plist
/ Users / (your_user_name) / Library / Preferences / loginwindow.plist

If you don't have a friend with a Mac, or you're already UNIX savvy, you can do the same thing by booting into single-user mode. You do that by holding down command-s when you turn it on. ("Command" is the key with the Apple logo and the curly-cue thing.) You'll get a text prompt instead of the pretty loginwindow, and you can type the following commands, hitting return after each line. (You will *have* to eliminate all spaces after slashes. Unfortunately Yahoo! cuts off the lines if they are typed properly, because it thinks they are web addresses!)
sudo rm /Library/ Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist
sudo rm /Library/ Preferences/loginwindow.plist
sudo rm /Users/ (your_user_name)/Library/ Preferences/ com.apple.loginwindow.plist
sudo rm /Users/ (your_user_name)/Library/ Preferences/loginwindow.plist

In either case, be sure to substitute "(your_user_name)" with whatever your short name actually is.

After removing those files, try booting up again. If that doesn't work, reinstall the OS.

Answer 2

Youre going to need the original CDs that came with the Mac and start up from them.
Or a set of system discs for a Mac running the same OS.
Or something like Norton also has a system boot disc, that will get it re-started for you, and then you can investigate what the problem is, and fix it that way.
But youre going to need a disc, that the computer can boot from when it tries to start up.

It seems like a hassle and a major problem, but once you get it started, unless its a major problem, its usually pretty simple to fix.

Good luck

Answer 3

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