help. g4 wont boot

[realitycheck]

hey
i am new to the macintosh family, so my friend brought over a mac and it was having poblems. so i took a look and when booted it goes into Darwin/BSD. since he acquired this secondhand, we do notknow the login, and have already tried "root" but comes out invalid. Ihave also tried to do a clean install, and it never boots from the cd. when i press the boot combos,all it does iz shoes a folder & then a question symbol, simultaneosly. Is there any other way, perhaps a different approach to Darwin.

all help is appreciated

thanx

 

[Scarlet Fever]

Just checking a few things;
- What kind of G4 is it? Do you know the speed?
- What keys are you holding when you try to start up from the CDs? The key to start up from an install CD is "C". You press it as soon as you hear the startup chime (or very shortly after you press the power button), and you can release it when you see the spinning gear (assuming it is Mac OS X)
- What CDs are you using? You should be using the CDs which came with the computer, or CDs from the retail version. Other computer's CDs probably won't work.

 

[disconap]

It sounds to me like this was used as a server or Darwin/Unix box of some kind. Best to get some OS discs and just blank the hdd with a fresh install.

 

[realitycheck]

Just checking a few things;
- What kind of G4 is it? Do you know the speed?
- What keys are you holding when you try to start up from the CDs? The key to start up from an install CD is "C". You press it as soon as you hear the startup chime (or very shortly after you press the power button), and you can release it when you see the spinning gear (assuming it is Mac OS X)
- What CDs are you using? You should be using the CDs which came with the computer, or CDs from the retail version. Other computer's CDs probably won't work.

I believe it is a g4 450 mhz. when i was able to access it it said processor 450 mhz. few days later it started booting into darwin

 

[mkrishnan]

I believe it is a g4 450 mhz. when i was able to access it it said processor 450 mhz. few days later it started booting into darwin

So you are not able to log in under Darwin at all, is that correct? It could be that the hard disk has a logical problem -- and it is not booting up graphically because it detects it and wants you to do fsck... now it's been a while since I booted in single user mode... do you have to authenticate to a user account to bring the system up in single user mode?

Try it. Hold down Cmd-S while booting. Then if you can get as far as a system prompt, do "fsck -fy" without the quotes.

 

[realitycheck]

So you are not able to log in under Darwin at all, is that correct? It could be that the hard disk has a logical problem -- and it is not booting up graphically because it detects it and wants you to do fsck... now it's been a while since I booted in single user mode... do you have to authenticate to a user account to bring the system up in single user mode?

Try it. Hold down Cmd-S while booting. Then if you can get as far as a system prompt, do "fsck -fy" without the quotes.

thanks, i tried to boot into single user mode, and it did, but unsuccessful in running the command "fsck -fy" heres what comes up:

**dev/rdisk0s5
**Root file system
** Checking Hfs Plus volume
** Checking extents overflow file.
**Checking catalog file
Invalid Key length
(4, 143)
** Volume check failed.


This is exactly what isi showing up on my screen. thanks for the effort , i really appreciate it, if you have any other way please post, again all help is appreciated.

thanks

 

[mkrishnan]

Mmm, I'm out of my league. You might try resetting all PRAM, NVRAM, PMU, etc (see the guides section of MR) and then after that, seeing if you can successfully boot from the install DVD. If you get that far, you want to seriously reconsider an erase & install (re-formatting the drive).

 

[realitycheck]

Mmm, I'm out of my league. You might try resetting all PRAM, NVRAM, PMU, etc (see the guides section of MR) and then after that, seeing if you can successfully boot from the install DVD. If you get that far, you want to seriously reconsider an erase & install (re-formatting the drive).

thanks again. have already tried resetting the nvram pram ,dont know about PMU whatever that is, and havent taken the risk of reformatting. does anybody know how to burn a cd on windows to use on mac. I need to know how burn a bootable .dmg file and successfully use on MAC