OS X 10.2 not booting

[damoninja]

Hi all,

I'm relatively new to macs but usually come across problems pretty well but I'm stumped.

Our office has a '99 G3 powermac with OS X 10.2 installed on it, but it died when I installed printer drivers. I't stuck on the grey apple screen, with no little "gear" ticker present.

I've tried holding shift for safe mode, C to boot from cd, opt-cmd-shft-del for alternate disk - none of these do anything. Cmd-opt-r-p will restart but doesn't help me at all.

I can load the command prompt with black text on white screen, but have no idea what i am doing here.

I managed to get the little gear to show after holding cmd-s, it comes up with the macface and ? sign flashing before hand, but it's still stuck on the gear.

If someone can help i'd be really grateful, if you need more info just ask.
Thanks

 

[ZiggyPastorius]

Hi all,

I'm relatively new to macs but usually come across problems pretty well but I'm stumped.

Our office has a '99 G3 powermac with OS X 10.2 installed on it, but it died when I installed printer drivers. I't stuck on the grey apple screen, with no little "gear" ticker present.

I've tried holding shift for safe mode, C to boot from cd, opt-cmd-shft-del for alternate disk - none of these do anything. Cmd-opt-r-p will restart but doesn't help me at all.

I can load the command prompt with black text on white screen, but have no idea what i am doing here.

I managed to get the little gear to show after holding cmd-s, it comes up with the macface and ? sign flashing before hand, but it's still stuck on the gear.

If someone can help i'd be really grateful, if you need more info just ask.
Thanks

If the ? is showing, it sounds like your OS X got deleted/corrupted/whatever, and you'll probably have to re-install...though I recommend waiting for someone else to chime in before doing that

 

[damoninja]

I'm getting mixed results now, sometimes no ticker, sometimes questionmark, i got it to boot to a CD once, someone suggested i try DiskWarrior so i booted that and got nothing. If i can get it to boot from cd i might just rebuild.

I've just got it to load as far as the blue screen - but no further.

 

[damoninja]

Now, i've loaded the OS X disk but it's telling me there is no destination drive..... Is this a crazy mac way of telling me the hdd is pooched?

 

[Amdahl]

Run Disk Utility from the install disc.

Also highly recommended to move to at least 10.3. 10.2 is really crappy and very slow.

 

[Xavier]

It sounds to me that the HDD is wacked. If it doesnt even locate it when you are booting from the CD.

Maybe just play it safe and get a new harddrive? And I also recommend getting off 10.2. It is one of the worst Mac OS X versions.

 

[damoninja]

I tried to load the hdd in another mac along with a usb cradle, and it's just not showing up. I threw it in a pc, shows up but goes clunky when I try and format it.

It's now in the bin, I'll dig up another hdd from the store room.

Thanks for your help everybody.