My system: G4/400 Yikes, with second 80-gig internal Seagate Barracuda HD connected to Sonnet Tempo ATA133 PCI card, where 10.2.6 resided peacefully and was main boot drive until yesterday. (The original 10-gig internal West. Dig. HD has 9.2.1 on it and is still controlled by its original bus; I almost never have to boot into 9 any more). Also 3rd party is the CD-RW/DVD Player by Toshiba which replaced my original CD-ROM/DVD, and which is supported fully under OSX but unfortunately not supported for burning in OS9 or Classic. I also use an external Zoom modem, since my internal modem got fried years ago by lightening. Oh, and also I use an Apple Pro keyboard that has volume buttons and eject button but no power button - this replaced the original short keyboard that came with my G4 - and a wired Macally 2-button optical mouse with scroll wheel which replaced the original hockey puck.
Here's the situation: My husband and I are users with admin privileges, and our grandson was a user without admin privileges. My husband deleted our grandson yesterday, and was attempting to put him back but at the setup window he accidentally hit "edit user" instead of "new user" while either his username or mine (he can't remember which) was selected. He got a box requesting name & password, and he typed our grandson's name and password and hit return. Poof!!! He says the screen and cursor froze, all he could do was hit the reset button on the front of the G4 tower. When the computer restarted, there was Apple's swirley blue desktop picture and the cursor, but no menu bar, no icons, no log-in screen, no dock, no response to any amount of clicking, nada. But if the cursor got put in [EMAIL PROTECTED]'s hot corner, that screensaver would come on just as it always did when the login box was up except that now there's no login box. For some reason, I have never been able to boot up from a CD by holding the C key down while restarting. I always have had to use the Startup Disk Control Panel to set a CD as startup disk. Always. So here I am with a blank screen in front of me, no visible way to boot into OS9 to see if I can see my Jaguar volume or maybe start up from Disk Warrior; and it's Sunday afternoon.
I restarted and did the command-S thing and got a prompt that was not "localhost#" which TMM told me to look for, but something like "sh2.05#". I'm deathly afraid of the whole unix thing, so I called Apple tech support. This nice guy walked me through some commands, and we ended up seeing so many error lines pertaining to "[EMAIL PROTECTED] screensaver" that he had me maneuver around and change it's library name to "Seti.old" and that effectively stopped the screensaver from activating. Seems he thought it was conflicting somehow. I can't tell you which different commands we tried; there was a lot of trouble getting it to "safe boot" because for some reason my computer doesn't recognize many key commands from this keyboard. We tried unhooking everything extra on the computer, leaving only the power cord, display cord, and keyboard plugged in - even unplugged the mouse. No matter what we tried, on reboot I would always get that blue desktop picture and no log-in window or icons. He recommended taking the computer to our nearest authorized repairperson, who incidentally is in a city 70 miles from where I live, and see if there was some way to re-install Jaguar doing an archive-and-install.
They wouldn't even be open til today, so in the meantime my husband and I tried a few other things. We finally got to boot into OS9 by holding in the power button on the tower to the count of ten, then letting go and hitting the reset button immediately. That method seems to consistently work. But, the OS10 volume wouldn't mount on 9's desktop; I kept getting a message saying the 80-gig drive was unreadable and did I want to initialize. (I didn't.) With Disk Warrior I was able to rebuild the directory, and now it mounts just fine. From OS9 I can open it and see that apparently all the files are there, and I can set the control panel to reboot with it. But then I just get that blue desktop swirly picture, etc. etc. I did the archive and install of Jaguar, but a reboot still gives me that blue desktop swirly picture, etc. etc. I called the authorized repairperson today, and he suggested I try a "clean" install of Jaguar instead of "archive & install", and at the setup screen to enter the exact same usernames & passwords that we had entered before. Still get that blue swirly picture, no icons, etc. etc, and no set-up screen that he told me I'd get. But at least I can get back to OS9 relatively painlessly. But I want my OS10 stuff: my i-apps, my music, my pictures, my Safari, and all the rest; I want to keep building my music library (love that iTunes music store!), and keep my iPod in sync with it.
I won't be able to take my computer to the authorized repairperson until the weekend. Anyone out there have any ideas as to what happened? What would you do about it?
Many thanks!
Carolyn in Missouri
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