Mac boots to some wierd command prompt.

[xypex982]

Well my G4 is booting into some strange command prompt and I have no idea why or how to fix it. When I try to boot from a cd it just has the little spining circle thing under the apple and never movies past that. Sometimes instead of going to the command prompt it will just go greay and say I need to restart my system. I have tried resetting nvram, and all that did was bring my bong back (which has been missing for a while)

Ok....now my g3 b/w gets to the grey screen with the apple, and then the apple turned into a circle with a line in it....I have no idea what to do with that either.

 

[Christopher]

the no smoking sign means OS X needs to be reinstalled because some file has broke.

As for the G4. Put that into target disk mode and erase the hard drive(of course taking your files) and reinstalling OS X.

Usually in my opinion, when your having those kind of problems, its just best to start from scratch.

 

[xypex982]

How do I put my g4 in target disk mode?

 

[Dog Cow]

Press Command-V as soon as you turn on the Mac. That's verbose mode and will let you see what messages are appearing on the UNIX side of things, messages which could help diagnose the problem.

 

[Christopher]

How do I put my g4 in target disk mode?

at boot up press and hold the T key until you see the firewire logo move around like a screen saver. You now have a $2,000 external hard drive.

 

[jhvaughan2]

the no smoking sign means OS X needs to be reinstalled because some file has broke.
As for the G4. Put that into target disk mode and erase the hard drive(of course taking your files) and reinstalling OS X.

Usually in my opinion, when your having those kind of problems, its just best to start from scratch.

Before you go to all the effort in rebuilding. Boot in target disk mode or from install cd and run disk utility and repair permissions. This has been known to fix this problem.

JHV

 

[Christopher]

Right, I forgot about that. Keep in mind that it will take ALOT longer then normal permissions repair.