My Mac Won't Boot Up

macs 4 lifemacs 4 life
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
In my area we had a power outage and the machine was making a beeping noise and going really, really slow while trying to load.. When I restarted the mac it would just stay at the apple icon loading screen and do nothing else. I PRAMed it, boot from the Cd and tried to go in safe mode. Nothing worked. I then reinstalled Tiger on my PowerMac g3 and for a minute it worked fine. I then installed the needed updates and restarted my machine and its doing the same thing it's did before just staying at the apple icon loading screen.





Any Help Appreciated!!!!!

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 2
    lundylundy Posts: 4,466member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Macs 4 Life

    In my area we had a power outage and the machine was making a beeping noise and going really, really slow while trying to load.. When I restarted the mac it would just stay at the apple icon loading screen and do nothing else. I PRAMed it, boot from the Cd and tried to go in safe mode. Nothing worked. I then reinstalled Tiger on my PowerMac g3 and for a minute it worked fine. I then installed the needed updates and restarted my machine and its doing the same thing it's did before just staying at the apple icon loading screen.





    Any Help Appreciated!!!!!



    You need to delete the com.apple.loginwindow.plist file in the Preferences.



    Doing this without a second boot drive is not going to be possible though. You'll need to have either a second boot partition or borrow an iPod or other external HD that has an OS on it.



    If you can hold down command-s during boot, it will boot into single-user. Maybe someone can chime in on how to navigate in Darwin single-user mode and delete that file.
  • Reply 2 of 2
    willywalloowillywalloo Posts: 408member
    Single user mode is great to utilize. Else-wise you can boot up from a CD, might only be with Tiger, but there should be a terminal app there.



    Goto Terminal or Single User mode.



    Here's where to look for this file to delete Remember that the rm command can remove any file. Make sure you do it right...no one is fully responsible, but you for doing this.



    cd means to change directory.

    ls means to list the current directory.

    rm means to remove a certain file.



    you want to immediately type this command:



    cd /Library/Preferences

    >>hit enter.



    ls

    >>hit enter. look for the file. in Unix/Linux, you can begin typing a file name and then hit 'tab' to finish it out.



    rm com.apple.loginwindow.plist

    >>hit enter. this will remove this pref. file.



    Also try looking for it here:

    /System/Library/Preferences

    ~/Library/Preferences



    Here the ~ will be interpreted by your computer as your home directory, no need to specify your username, your computer will know what you mean.
Sign In or Register to comment.