FSCK it!
Okay - I screwed myself again. I mistakenly installed another OS 9 driver without first booting in OS 9. Realizing this I decided to correct the problem. So I wiped the install data, rebooted in OS 9, installed, and then rebooted in OS X. But I coulnd't get past the spinning rainbow at the startup screen. "No problem," I says to myself, I'll just "fsck -y" it like I did last time. But I can't get that far.
I start single user mode (cmd s) and get the command line interface and it starts to run through its routine line by line. But it gets to "BSD root: disk0s5, major 14, minor 5" and the next line "devfs on/dev" It then locks up so that I don't ever get a command prompt where I can type fsck -y. One time the boot process got all the way to "localhost#" before it locked up.
So I'm trying to fsck -y it, but I can't get that far. Any ideas? Do I need to do a OS X reinstall? If so do I lose all of my apps and data files?
Gobble Gobble
I start single user mode (cmd s) and get the command line interface and it starts to run through its routine line by line. But it gets to "BSD root: disk0s5, major 14, minor 5" and the next line "devfs on/dev" It then locks up so that I don't ever get a command prompt where I can type fsck -y. One time the boot process got all the way to "localhost#" before it locked up.
So I'm trying to fsck -y it, but I can't get that far. Any ideas? Do I need to do a OS X reinstall? If so do I lose all of my apps and data files?
Gobble Gobble
Comments
<strong>Have you tried Disk Utility from the CD yet? How about DiskWarrior or some other disk utility?
I don't know about a specific fix for your problem, but if it does need a reinstall (which it really shouldn't, but lack of community knowledge may make that easiest) you will not loose apps or data as long as you do not reformat.
[ 04-08-2002: Message edited by: AirSluf ]</strong><hr></blockquote>
Unfortunately, that's not true. If you have to reinstall, the only way is with a reformat. When Apple released some update or other, the ability to reinstall without a reformat was LOST. It sucks. Hopefully it won't get to that point. What I'd recommend, if you have to go that route, is find another mac and use target disk mode to salvage what you can. Sorry I don't have better news.
<a href="http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20011024133925384" target="_blank">link to macosxhints article</a> <img src="graemlins/hmmm.gif" border="0" alt="[Hmmm]" />
I don't know a thing about partioning a disk and am afraid I'd just end up wiping everything if I tried that. So I think my only option is to drag my iMac down to the Apple Store Genius Bar and let them fiddle with it.
In the mean time, I'm going to drag this thread over to the Genius Bar and see if anyone lurking there has any ideas.