GNNNNGH... iBook failing to boot: 'Waiting for Application Services'

kickahakickaha
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
Okay, this one has me stumped.



My wife's iBook decided to flake out last night, locking up *HARD* while she was surfing.



Now, it refuses to get past this point in the boot process. I have tried moving /Library/Caches aside, thinking it might be a corrupted cache problem that could be cleared up, but nada.



Even Safe Boot mode hangs at this point... single user fsck shows no disk corruption, and everything appears to check out okay. It just won't boot.



Anyone care to toss a pointer on what else might be going on? I'm not seeing anything else that looks funky, except that NetInfo is also failing to start up correctly, which I suspect is the real cause... :P



file_init failed: Remote server error

ni_init failed: Remote server error

start_service failed: Remote server error - exiting



Except... there's no remote server in her setup, just local.nidb. In theory. So, perhaps a pointer to which file to tweak the rotten nose of to fix *THAT* little problem? (There must be a config file to tell netinfo how to set up its domains before it starts reading *.nidb files, yes?)



Edit: Ah, found an earlier failure:



Directly after 'devfs on /dev', I see:



in6_ifattach_loopback: failed to configure the loopback address on lo0 (errno=55)



But, looking back in the /var/log/system.log chain, this started showing up only *after* the first boot failure where NetInfo choked. Still smells like a cache problem to me, but darned if I can find it.



Anyone?



Bueller?



Edit #2:



On attempting a shutdown from single-user mode, I get 3 instances of:



bootstrap_look_up(): failed (ipc/send) invalid destination port



Now *that* sounds like a mach messaging problem to me... anyone have an idea on *that* one?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 10
    der kopfder kopf Posts: 2,275member
    Is there a possibility that you might be dealing with a hardware failure? Is the iBook using an airport card? It looks as if a network card might have failed (airport/ethernet).



    So maybe run the hardware check disc?



    Otherwise, have you booted off a cd yet? If that works, I'd have no second thoughts about backing-up and reinstalling, especially with errors this serious.
  • Reply 2 of 10
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    The ip6 failure seems to have been intermittent, and it's down to the NetInfo now...



    I actually thought of the AirPort card first, and reseated it as one of the first things, but no go.



    Will try the CD boot and see what happens.
  • Reply 3 of 10
    alcimedesalcimedes Posts: 5,486member
    actually, an archive install should also have problems if it's a network issue. i'd say the quickest solution would be archive install, see if that works. if not archive install w/o porting network settings. that will work w/o question, unless something is horribly wrong.
  • Reply 4 of 10
    ghost_user_nameghost_user_name Posts: 22,667member
    Are iBooks prone to this kind of hardware failure?\\
  • Reply 5 of 10
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    I'm not convinced it's a hardware failure yet...



    The iBook locked up at one point, she hard-rebooted, and it failed to boot. I checked with fsck, no problems... but it occurred to me tonight that I hadn't tried fixing *permissions*. If NetInfo can't access/create a file it needs, it will fail (file_init failure?), which could easily cascade across lookupd to ApplicationServices.framework, causing the hang.



    I realized that after we got the laptop back from Apple repair (horror saga worth a tome of its own for something completely unrelated), I never checked to see if journaling were on... it's not. D'oh.
  • Reply 6 of 10
    pensievepensieve Posts: 661member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Kickaha

    I'm not convinced it's a hardware failure yet...



    The iBook locked up at one point, she hard-rebooted, and it failed to boot. I checked with fsck, no problems... but it occurred to me tonight that I hadn't tried fixing *permissions*. If NetInfo can't access/create a file it needs, it will fail (file_init failure?), which could easily cascade across lookupd to ApplicationServices.framework, causing the hang.



    I realized that after we got the laptop back from Apple repair (horror saga worth a tome of its own for something completely unrelated), I never checked to see if journaling were on... it's not. D'oh.



    Have you put it in target disk mode and repaired permissions that way? Have you tried using it to boot another computer? Put it in target disk mode and choose it as the start up disk for another mac. This, I *think* would allow you some more information (if it fails to boot a computer that works, it would likely be a software thing).
  • Reply 7 of 10
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    Yup, just did the permissions as target mode... nada.



    edit: Actually, it reported that *EVERY* file was wrong on permissions... it occured to me only later that the OS mounts target drives with your own user permissions, etc, overriding what's actually on disk, so it does bupkus.



    Also ran the Hardware Check CD that came with it... nada.



    At this point I'm restoring a backup version of the NetInfo db to see if there's a silent error in there (although the timestamps are fine... odd).



    I am *really* quite stumped at this point.



    Next step is to try and just plain boot if from a CD... just have to *find* the right one... :}
  • Reply 8 of 10
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    Got it.



    Twas simply a bad NetInfo database.



    Moved /var/db/netinfo/local.nidb to local.nidb.bad, and rebooted. Voila. No problems. Removed /var/db/.AppleSetupDone and went back through the setup routine, and all is good.
  • Reply 9 of 10
    pensievepensieve Posts: 661member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Kickaha

    Got it.



    Twas simply a bad NetInfo database.



    Moved /var/db/netinfo/local.nidb to local.nidb.bad, and rebooted. Voila. No problems. Removed /var/db/.AppleSetupDone and went back through the setup routine, and all is good.



    Any idea what happened to make it go bad? The netinfo db isn't something I've ever thought about backing up. Should I?
  • Reply 10 of 10
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    Not a freakin' clue what made it go south, but yes, you should backup your NetInfo database with your normal backup system. In fact, /var/db should be backed up completely. /var/backups/ holds a backup copy of your NetInfo db that is updated every morning at 03:15, *if your machine is on*. In this case, my wife's laptop never was, so the backup was never done.



    But yes, backup /var/db/ by all means. (I'd say backup all of /var/, but you need to skip /var/vm/ (the virtual memory swap files) and /var/tmp/ (temporary files that get deleted on every boot anyway).)
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