Oy vey! Startup trouble.

[armchainmstenw]

I am running a 800MHz g4 imac with 512 mb ram,on OS 10.2.8 approx 3 years old. currently, when i try to boot, it starts up, loads the finder and desktop, then reverts to an aqua screen...then it loads the finder and desktop, reverts to an aqua screen...and so on...
does anyone know of how this might be fixed, aside from a reinstall(cd drive is spotty)?

 

[ham_man]

I am running a 800MHz g4 imac with 512 mb ram,on OS 10.2.8 approx 3 years old. currently, when i try to boot, it starts up, loads the finder and desktop, then reverts to an aqua screen...then it loads the finder and desktop, reverts to an aqua screen...and so on...
does anyone know of how this might be fixed, aside from a reinstall(cd drive is spotty)?

Repair permissions and try to clean out everything, and if that doesn't work, borrow/buy an external to do a clean install...

 

[armchainmstenw]

is there any way to repair permissions from open firmware or single user mode?
ive done a filesystem check, with the result of "the disk cannot be repaired".
Ive tried a firewire transfer, but i cant repair permissions from the other comp, and i cant install osx to the broken one using the other with a firewire link...
unfortunately i know noone who has an external, and am hesitant to buy one...

 

[Krazykrl]

This means your user is corrupt.

Hopefully you have more than one user setup. This happened to me once before. What I did was I kept hitting Command-Shift-Q keys until the Logout screen finally appeared, than I logged out. Login as a different user, and you should find that everything is OK. Once this complete, create a new user with a similar name. Than delete the corrupt user, when you delete a user it gives you the option to save the users data to a folder, so if you had data on the desktop or in the users documents folder that you need, then save it.

Than you can rename the new user to what the corrupt user was named and you should be good.

If you don't have another user setup, than you will want to try to boot off of the Mac OS X install CD and try to run a repair disk and then a repair disk permissions. If you have Disk Warrior, try that too.

If all else fails, you will want to reinstall OS X.