Startup problems

[parrothead]

Help! My Tibook 500 is having trouble starting up. I am running 10.2.8 and when it gets to the blue background the startup process hangs at the point where it says finding disks (or something to that effect). I have tried force restarting it a couple of times but have not tried starting up from CD (lost mine ) Any suggestions or if not, bad news?

Thanks

 

[rjeffreyproctor]

Try resetting the PMU. There shoul dbe a button under the keyboard. see apple.com/support for a more detailed description of how to do it, as i am not too familiar with the 500 tiBook.

 

[cpjakes]

You may have something up with your hard drive, I've had that issue with SCSI drives and OS X. In my case, it was the seating of the SCSI card, but could probably be the connection to your drive.

Is this a consistent problem?

cpjakes

 

[idea_hamster]

Before doing anything drastic, I would start up from the Jaguar Install Disc 1 (Power Button, immediately insert disc and hold down the "C" button) and use Disk Utility to check the hard drive.

Also, I'd try starting up in single-user mode. (1) Restart and hold down Cmd.-S until you see a black screen of marginally intelligible UNIX stuff. (2) When you get a blinking curson type in the following:

fsck -y

and a return (note the space between fsck and the hyphen). If everything is OK, the Mac should eventually return the message "[hard drive name] appears to be OK" or something like that. If the Mac says that it changed anything, you should run the process again until it says it's OK. If four or five passes of fsck -y don't do it, you'll need something else.

Good Luck!

 

[parrothead]

Thanks everyone for your help.

I got home from work yesterday and my computer started up fine. However, this time after start up my external disk failed to mount. I tried doing different things and finally booted up in OS 9 and ran disk first aid on the ext. disk. It found a bt tree error and repaired it. This fixed the problem, both times it happened last night. I think there is something that is messing up the hard drive causing the computer not to see it. I am thinking of clean installing jaguar or convincing my wife to let me get Panther and clean installing that.

 

[Toeknee]

Noticed that youre in Honolulu... have you tried taking it down to the apple store there at ala moana? Let the Genius table have a crack at your problem. My iMac (blueberry) had been acting up, it had fried the original hard drive so I bought a new one. It was still acting up until i took out one of the 2 sticks of RAM now it works. Long story short, have you checked the ram yet? Those are my 2 cents.

 

[virividox]

yeah if it still acts up, you might want to do clean installs, but try to exhaust all posibilities before those drastic measures

 

[parrothead]

I would take it to the mac store but since my applecare is expired they wont talk to me ,ask any questions, or especially look at the computer without me shelling out some cash. I would like to avoid that if at all possible. I will check the RAM though.