Well crap, again: OS X 10.2.8 G3 AIO just sits there at startup... please help

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AG-Wolf's picture
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Well crap, again: OS X 10.2.8 G3 AIO just sits there at startup... please help

hell, I thought the problem was fixed but when I just hooked up my Quadra 605 to the network, I guess OS X got confused when it noticed there was another AppleTalk connection going on "Huh? What the hell is System 7.6.1?!" Because when I came back to it, the machine was going WICKED slow, was totally unresponsive to anything except the Mac 3-finger-salute... so as it tries starting up again... it's just sitting there at the grey screen.

-WTF- WHY??? Why is OS X so much crappier than 9, 8, 7 or even 6?? What can I do now? I can't startup from another CD because it just keeps restarting over and over after it hits the Happy Mac; I don't have the original OS X discs because I bought the computer alone from someone on eBay. I'm just completely out in the dark. X is nowhere near as versatile as 9 or anything prior, and all of my experience in previous Mac OSes gets me nowhere with this stupid bastardization of a once good product.

Can anyone offer some sort of solution? I'm sorry to sound demanding or anything, and especially sorry if I sound liek a n00b (I'm not technically; I know PRE os X macs and OSes like the back of my hand...) but I just really am sick of this dumb hunk of impersonal non-user-friendly plastic and metal, and need some sort of help before I toss it and get so drastic that I go back to my Classic II. *sigh* -.-;

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Well it sounds like your prob

Well it sounds like your problem started when you hooked it up to the network. Hvae you tried unplugging it from the network then powering it back up?

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*Four* fingers

Or have you tried the "four finger salute" (i.e. resetting the PRAM)? If not, I would suggest doing so just to be on the safe side.

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I've done both, neither have

I've done both, neither have done anything :/ A friend of mine suggested holding shift at start up because apparently that brings it into some sort of safe mode; but I did that too and nothing happened.

Someone else I'm talking to said:

"Anything before 10.3 doesnt have a journaling filesystem so a single hard reboot could be detrimental to the OS..."

And that doesn't sound too reassuring.

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Untrue

Journaling only makes filesystem recovery faster. It doesn't make it any more or less safe with a hard reboot. 10.2.x and below are just as good at recovering from a crash as 10.3 is. If you're feeling adventurous, you can enable journaling in 10.2 (once you have it back up) if you want by following the instructions here.

Try this: hold down Command-V at startup. This will start you in verbose mode, which will put up a bunch of text showing what's going on behind the scenes. Post what it prints out.

Also, try this: hold down Command-S at boot. This should start you in Single User mode, a command line mode. Once it's up, type "/sbin/fsck -fy" without quotes and hit return. if all is OK, you should see "** The volume (name of volume) appears to be OK."

If all is not well, you will see:

***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****

If you see that, run the command again until you see the OK message. Once you're done with that, type: "reboot" without quotes and hit return.

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Wow... that's like... all Gre

Wow... that's like... all Greek to me. I honestly appreciate the reply, and will save it should anything ever come up again, but I seem to have fixed whatever problem was going on myself...

1) I started in Safe mode... after waiting about 5 minutes with my finger on the shift key... But it indeed worked.
2) Told it to start up in OS 9, restarted.
3) 9 started fine (because Mac OS -before- OS X will always work Wink )
4) Restarted and booted off of a Norton 7 CDR I had...and although the Norton 7 disc had a pit in the reflective surface which rendered enough of a problem to have the program bitch at me, I managed to run teh disk utility and have it fix a whole bunch of "major" problems.
5) Opened Startup Disk control panel and selected X system folder
6) Restarted, and it SEEMS to be working fine.

In this process, I've lost a 24x scsi drive (last night because I forced it to open with a paper clip, and now the drive is dead and unresponsive), gotten very frustrated; but have also learned quite a lot about OS X, gotten help from some people here as well as a site my friend sent me http://www.fif3.com/howto/archives/001983.html, bought a new 24x cd drive on ebay, and bought a full version of OS 10.2 on ebay (so I will now have it at my disposal whenever I need it); and just in general gotten a greater appreciation for the OLDER Macs, but gained further understanding of this "new world", if you will, of the Mac.

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Glad it's working

I'm glad you got it working again. My post above is the geeky way to do what you did. I generally don't assume people have Norton or Disk Warrior or whatever, so I try to work with what's there.

Anyway... Keep in mind that you are on a pretty old machine for OS X. If my Beige wasn't highly upgraded, X would probably be pretty unbearable on it speed-wise. Once you start using X for a while, you may find yourself loathe to go back to classic Mac OS. There are many features that are worth the cost of entry.

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I dunno..my 6500 is still kic

I dunno..my 6500 is still kickin' right along, and until I know X like the back of my hand, I'm gonna hold pretty confident that 9's still capable of more things that -I- need to do with a computer Blum 3

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