Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

mygodimissyou

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 5, 2009
1
0
Hello,

I’ve been trying to fix a ibook G4 (osx 10.3.9) that was booting to the black Darwin/BSD

(Lan.Local) (console)
Login:

screen.

It did not accept any passwords (indeed it would only let you type a username and then not allow any keyboard input thereafter except <return>)

I proceeded in accordance with

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=1553062

to force fsck and to rename the netinfo file:

/sbin/mount -uw /
cd /var/db/netinfo
mv local.nidb/ local.nidb.bad
ls -ln /Users

This didn’t have any effect so I also removed the .AppleSetupDone (rm /var/db/ .AppleSetupDone) file in accordance with the following advice on that page.

Now when booting up the language selector flashes up unclickably (despite however feverishly and undiscrimately you attack it with the mouse) and osx continues to load as normal until you reach a blank blue screen (which would be immediately before the login I imagine) in which the cursor appears intermittently along with an, again unclickable, error message saying that Setup Assistant has unexpectedly terminated, and would I like to tell Apple?

I followed the bluescreen advice on the apple website

(http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1411)

Namely, renaming the user preferences file and repairing permissions with diskutil.

The computer remains in the state described above. No new hardware or software has been recently installed. Fsck runs without error and says ‘The volume Macintosh HD appears to be OK.’. I’ve no installer CD and, in desperation, tried to boot from the Das Boot program of a CD burned from my Windows PC (from which I am writing this) to no avail. Any help would be most appreciated.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.