iMac not getting past blue screen

[147798]

I am running OSX 10.5.7. Installed it several weeks ago. This morning, the computer was acting up a bit. For instance, in my wife's account, I couldn't access our shared iTunes library, getting the error saying it was locked.

When I rebooted, suddenly I couldn't get into the machine. It just hangs on a blue screen. I've tried booting with the shift key down, and that didn't do anything. I also tried cmd-s, but don't know what to do with that at the prompt, and cmd-v, which works fine, but just dumps me into the blue screen again.

I have a bootable FW drive, and I can boot fine off that, and even see the internal drive. I've opened files on the internal drive -- it all looks intact. But I still can't boot from the internal drive.

I've tried Googling for solutions, but if you google "hangs on blue screen" or bsod or whatever around OSX, you get a bunch of hits related to installing 10.5.7, which isn't my issue, and you also get articles from 2006 and 2004, etc. which I am a little to reluctant to try their solutions.

Anyone have any ideas on something like this? I was hoping it was some sort of permissions thing, but I am not really sure. Any help is appreciated.

 

[BobZune]

Back up the important material off the internal HDD first while booted from the bootable FW disk. Then start the DiskUtilities and do a repair of the internal disk (disk repair, not permissions repair) - see if that fixes the problem.

[You can do a permissions repair later when you boot off the internal HDD.]

 

[147798]

Back up the important material off the internal HDD first while booted from the bootable FW disk. Then start the DiskUtilities and do a repair of the internal disk (disk repair, not permissions repair) - see if that fixes the problem.

Thanks Bob for replying (only one!). I tried disk repair and permissions repair. Nada. So, I used migration assistant to bring my users from the internal drive to the external, then carbon copy cloner to replicate (at block level) from the external back to the internal. Seems to be working.

Thanks again for taking the time to reply, but I'll clearly not rely on this forum for tech issues. I guess I should keep it to the rumors level!