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mac wont login

J

jpkey

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 14, 2007
4
0
I have a powerbook G4 titanium edition, my mac is fairly old and I've had ongoing problems with it taking a long time to bootup. I'll repair premissions and use disk utilities and it doesn't seem to help but the problem usually just goes away by itself. my mac froze the other day so I tried to reboot it, took longer than a half hour to finally get to the login screen. When I choose my user it doesn't ask for my password but instead goes to what I guess is called the console... Black screen. It says Darwin/BSD (localhost) (console) It also says localhost crashdump and states that a crash report was written to a file. It asks for login and password. When I login it just stays at this screen and says welcome to darwin. I've tried runnin sbin/fsck but any commands I've tried doesn't work. Is there someway to get logged in from this console any commands that I can type in? I've also booted it up using the startup disk and run utilities but the same thing happens when I restart it. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated thanks
Jackie
 
Okay, boot holding OPTION and see if it gives you the ability to select your internal drive. How much free space do you have on your boot drive? What sort of third party hardware do you have connected or installed? :)
 
I tried holding option when rebooting and it went into classic mode had a picture of the brain and refresh arrow and continue arrow which is what I imagine is supposed to happen... anyhow nothing happened when i clicked on the brain so i clicked the continue arrow and just continued booting which takes FOREVER. It froze half way through rebooting and shows a little blackbox. I think there's some major damage internally, but any other suggestions would be great and thanks again for the reply:eek:
 
I ran fsck and the system was ok, I tried running disk utilities and repair disk, got half way through and post error, I even tried archiving and install but that wasn't able to complete because of an error. I tried booting up my mac with the installation disk and for some reason it just stalls and it wont boot up, even though it worked the other day. I read that I might have to modify /etc/ttys to set the loginwindow to default, I dont know if this would work or not or how exactly you would go about doing this. Does this mean it would just bypass the login window? If not is there someway you can do that? I zapped the PRAM and that didn't work, I also booted up in verbose mode, but i dont think that would have helped anyhow. Also when it goes to Darwin console mode it displays crashdump [186] crash report written to a file in Security Agent, so perhaps thats why it doesn't go passed the login screen. Thanks so much for your suggestions if anyone can help I would greatly appreciate it, I've been looking online for days now for solutions and I've tried just about everything I can to no avail.
 
Mate don't worry about the login window just yet 'cause I've got a feeling your problem lies deeper than that. Do you have another Mac handy, or an external Firewire drive? :)
 
after trying numerous amount of things I simply logged in safe mode and deleted a few files in prefence that were labeled loginwindow and windowserver, restarted my mac and it FINALLY let me log in. Thanks so much for your suggestions.
 
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