Help...Blue screen on 10.2.8
I have a 400mhz Sawtooth G4 running 10.2 Jaguar. Last Friday, I figured the 10.2.8 update had been posted long enough for the concerns to be dealt with, and fired up Software Update.
I downloaded the updates for 10.2.8 and Quicktime. All went well, until early this morning when a crash in Mail forced me to reboot and since then all I get is a blue screen of silence. Multiple restarts have been done. Each time the computer starts up, the progress bars load, but the login screen never appears. Cursor is on screen and movable. The blue background seems to go light and dark every now and then, but because the startup procedure does kick in at first, I'm guessing it's not the monitor or the hard drive.
I've tried:
Tried Safe Boot - Doesn't see my OS 9 system to startup. Hasn't been used for ages, but it's there.
Disk Utility - reset permissions and checked the disk. Minor errors fixed.
Booted from Norton - fixed errors (including a "crosslinked" Mail file.)
Is there anything else I can do here? (short of a full reinstall!)
This is my main production machine, so any help would be GREATLY appreciated.
I downloaded the updates for 10.2.8 and Quicktime. All went well, until early this morning when a crash in Mail forced me to reboot and since then all I get is a blue screen of silence. Multiple restarts have been done. Each time the computer starts up, the progress bars load, but the login screen never appears. Cursor is on screen and movable. The blue background seems to go light and dark every now and then, but because the startup procedure does kick in at first, I'm guessing it's not the monitor or the hard drive.
I've tried:
Tried Safe Boot - Doesn't see my OS 9 system to startup. Hasn't been used for ages, but it's there.
Disk Utility - reset permissions and checked the disk. Minor errors fixed.
Booted from Norton - fixed errors (including a "crosslinked" Mail file.)
Is there anything else I can do here? (short of a full reinstall!)
This is my main production machine, so any help would be GREATLY appreciated.
Comments
Originally posted by pensieve
It sounds like your login window is crashing. Do you have access to another networked machine? If you can ssh into the crashing box, you should be able to more information about what's going on.
Thanks for your reply Pensieve.
I'm a longtime Mac user with absolutely no Unix experience. I have my laptop that I can network with or use Firewire Disk mode to gain access to the startup hard drive, but I don't know how I would "ssh into the crashing box" or what to look for when I'm there.
Is a full reinstall the best way to go in this case?
I do have a backup on an external hard drive, made before the update. I could retrieve needed files from this, but I doubt the login files would be transferable for security reasons.
That is, assuming that it's the login prefs that are somehow corrupted.