gray screen with circle and a slash thru it?

joser said:

heres my friends problem its a dual g4 mdd dual 1.0ghz 512mb 64mb video card and superdrive....w/ panther 10.3.5 running...so here it goes...was running fine powered off than he went to power on.... it booted but no chime and it looks like it loading he gets a gray screen with a circle and a slash thru it any ideas? please help thanx in advance....

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Oh, cr@p I know thats not good that mean somethings bad, I had 3 iMac 500mhz with the same probe and it was the PAV Board and way to much to repair... But your can't be a PAV since its not an AIO... I shall post again in the morning with an anser for sure...

This may mean that the computer can't find the Operating System - I think. I'm pretty sure I had this once, when I stupidly messed with my system as it upgraded the OS.

My cure - reinstall the OS. Luckily, I was able to do an archive and install, and saved all my files/settings.

See if you can boot from the install CD, maybe try Disk Utility?

bubbamac said:

This may mean that the computer can't find the Operating System - I think. I'm pretty sure I had this once, when I stupidly messed with my system as it upgraded the OS.

My cure - reinstall the OS. Luckily, I was able to do an archive and install, and saved all my files/settings.

See if you can boot from the install CD, maybe try Disk Utility?

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Wow, gald that worked for you, when this happend to mine I could not get it to read the CD/s... I have heard of this many times, but I'm an Mac expert for older Mac mainly...

What have you tried for troublshooting?

Open Firmware reset? PRAM Zappage? Fsck?

This sounds similar to what I just went through. Do you have an external drive you can boot with? If so, I'd use that. Then, if you can access the normal boot drive backup whatever is important to you first. Then see about running disk utility. If disk utility (or fsck in single user mode) fails then you'll need to reformat the drive and reinstall the system.

I ended up doing a long reformat on my HD (zero all, since TTP4 found a bad block) and then did a clean reinstall of Panther. The difference in overall responsiveness is astounding! I started using OS 10.1 and had just upgraded from that to Jaguar and from that to Panther (though, I may have used a clean install of Jaguar when I got this HD, but I can't remember.) Between that and maybe just a better laid out hard drive, applications launch in one bounce or less instead of typically three. The speed boost at least was a positive to go along with the hassle.