Snow Leopard Server on brand new Mini; Gray screen

Have you tried holding option when you boot to see if it shows your startup drive?

Brian Blum said:

I just tried it. Yes, it shows the name of the hard drive. I click that and it just stays on the gray screen with the spinning gray thing.

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Hold down the Command+ V key on boot. It should enter Verbose mode, you should be able to find out where it is hanging.

Just so you know, I am running SLS on my new 2.26 Mini and it working great. So I know you can get it working

You can try this to get it load:

1) boot with [command+s key]

2) sbin/fsck -fy

3) sbin/mount -uw /

4) disable bonjour with "launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist"

You'll get an error message saying it could not unload, that is normal.

5) Reboot

You should be able to boot. But this isn't really a fix, it seems like DNS isn't properly setup. If you are able to boot disable the DNS service with server admin and reload mDNSResponder

"launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist"

Let us know what happens.

Or you could take the mini and your Snow Leopard Server disc to an Apple Store and have a Genius take a look at it. Or call AppleCare and have them walk you through it. OS X Server comes with very good support.

Brian Blum said:

Thanks for all the help. It's fixed now. Unfortunately, I don't know what I'm talking about so I can't really explain what I did except to say:

I booted in single-user mode (CMD-S). Then I typed:

mount -uw /

chmod 775 /

Then pressed Ctrl-D and it rebooted fine.

It's all gibberish to me really. I did learn two things from this though: 1. This forum is awesome; and 2. Servers are best left to the professionals.

I'm having fun messing around with it though. Thanks again!

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Interesting. What you did was change the root permissions.

Remember, the professionals started where you are today. I am not there yet, but hope to be an Apple SysAdmin in the near future

Good luck and have fun. Just a tip though, do lots of testing and be careful with your data.

Thank You!!!

Thanks so much for posting this solution. I am in the same boat as you - learning. I searched for 3 hours before I found this solution, thanks again!

The "chmod 775 /" thing really worked! Amazing, thanks! I wonder what changed the root permissions.

Brian Blum said:

Thanks for all the help. It's fixed now. Unfortunately, I don't know what I'm talking about so I can't really explain what I did except to say:

I booted in single-user mode (CMD-S). Then I typed:

mount -uw /

chmod 775 /

Then pressed Ctrl-D and it rebooted fine.

It's all gibberish to me really. I did learn two things from this though: 1. This forum is awesome; and 2. Servers are best left to the professionals.

I'm having fun messing around with it though. Thanks again!

Click to expand...

10 years later, this answer helped bring my Mac mini 2,1 Snow Leopard Server 10.6.8 back to life. Thanks!