George Dafermos' Weblog

Thursday, April 15, 2004

Need help urgently! iBook in serious danger

my little iBook died last night and i need your help to whip it back into shape. i've tried everything i know but no good. nothing has worked so far. my G3 iBook came preloaded with macosx 10.2.6 - now running 10.2.8 and the apple macosx cds that came with it are version 10.2.4.

short description of the problem: i've been using it for about a year with close to no problems. some apps crash all the time, but that's perfectly natural i suppose. in the space of this year, the OS crashed only once or twice, which is an astonishing feat if you've ever used windows. anyway, that's about how it used to be until it panicked: it boots up whenever it feels like it, and when it actually gets past the welcome to macinstosh and log in screen, the screen starts blinking on and off, long vertical lines run through the screen, a few times the screen split into two, and it eventually freezes, and sometimes it looks like it turns to switch off mode (ie. black screen, no user control, machine dead).

so what did i do to try to fix the problem? the process i followed consists of six steps.

#1: i inserted the hardware test CD and i got a "everything ok" message, so i assumed it isn't a hardware problem after all (immensely more frightening than a mere software probelm). i proceeded to step #2.

#2: i inserted the first of the two macosx 10.2.4. cds that came with my iBook, pressed C during boot-up, and after a while i got to the installer. there, i chose DISK UTILITY-->FIRST AID-->REPAIR and i got a message "volume HD Macintosh appears to be OK". But after rebooting, the screen kept blinking and the cursor froze. so, i proceeded to step #3.

#3: While booting up, i pressed the apple symbol and S to get into single user mode. Some commands ran through the screen, and when it stopped at sh-2.05a# (note: usually, that would be localhost#, but all the other commands that would logically appear before localhost# also appeared before sh-2.05a#, so i went for it anyway. perhaps something eludes me here?). then, i typed fsck -y and after some time i got the message "..appears to be ok". i typed reboot and hit return. I managed to get until the log-in screen and then it froze again, leaving me there watching the damn thing while i started cracking up too. i proceeded to step#4.

#4: I inserted the macosx 10.2.4 CD (1/2) again, and went for a clean install. at the options, i clicked "archive and install" and "preserve users and network settings" so that i wouldn't lose my network settings, files, folders, etc... Halfway through the installation process though (about 15-20min later), it froze unexpectedly again. so i rebooted and proceeded to step #5.

#5: now, and with the same macosx CD, i tried to repeat the process as described in step#4, but this time i couldn't click on the "archive and install" option (dunno why), so i went for "upgrade macosx" which looked only marginally worse than "archive and install" and way better than "erase...". again, halfway through the installation process, i got a "there were errors installing the software - try installing again" message, so i rebooted and proceeded to step #6.

#6: i repeated the process as described in step #5 (upgrade macosx) and after 20-30min, i got the same "there were errors installing the software - try installing again" message.after restarting, and ever since (without pressing C while boot-up to load from the macosx cd) all i get are screens of death, prompting me to reboot. but no matter how many times i rebooted, the system keeps craching.

so, here i am now, emitting this call for help smoke signal through the valleys and mountains of blogland, calling the ones who are better than i am, to help me whip this little motherfucker back into shape. any help will be most appreciated. thanks.

10:03:57 PM

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