Please Help ASAP! Mac G4 won't boot in OS X!

beatlesfan

Registered
I am having major issues with my G4 mac. 400 mhz. Running on OS X 10.4 (10.4.8, I believe). I left on vacation & came back 7 days later. As I booted & began to try to download my vacation pics from my camera, it seemed really slow, so I had to force shut down. When I tried to reboot, it doesn't get past the gray screen with the apple & progress indicator. It just spins & spins but goes nowhere. I have seen where people have posted that they came back after a couple hours & their computer was working. No luck here, I left it on all day while I was at a work, & it was still stalled at the same spot when I came home. Below are the things I have tried:

1. DiskWarrior. (I can get it to boot from the CD using the C command on startup.) It ran through replacing the directory. Found a bunch of errors but fixed them. Shows the hard drive is fine. After rebooting & the computer still stalling, I tried DiskWarrior again but it showed nothing wrong.

2. Tried zapping PRAM & NVRAM. No luck.

3. Disk Utility. I ran disk utility. It found no disk errors. Tried again, still stalls.

4. Tried holding down shift key to start in safe mode, but it does nothing at all.

5. I did a search on Apple.com & found where it said to find the file BaseSystem.pkg & get it into /Library/Receipts. Replaed the file with the one from the Tiger install CD. Still stalls.

6. Decided to just go do an Archive & Install to replace the old system, but it won't let me. Says I have a newer version & have to do a clean install. This would cause me to loose a bunch of important files that I haven't backed up lately (I know! I know! I'm bad!!!). Freaked a bit.... It would take me forever to burn cds of all my files...

7. OS 9. So I thought I would try to startup in OS 9.2, & that works. So I am assuming that it is an issue with OS X Tiger.

8. I also tried to boot up without anything plugged in but the keyboard & mouse. Still stalled.

9. I also tried repairing the permissions using Disk Utility from the Tiger CD, but it gave me an error "No Valid Packages".

10. Also, I also held down Command V & this is the jabberwacky that come up:
copywright info

using 655 buffer headers and 655 cluster IO buffer headers
Extension "com.apple.driver.KeyLargoATA" has no kernal dependency.
Firewire (OHCI) TI ID 8019 built-in now active, GUID 000a27ff feaea2b8; max speed s400.
Extension "com.apple.driver.iTunesPhoneDriver" has no kernal dependency.
Security auditying service present
BSM auditing present
disabled
rooting via boot-uuid from /chosen: 8B36B553-732C-3892-81EO-252A7972BAB7
Waiting on <dict ID="0"><key>IOProviderClass</key><string ID="1">IO Resources</string><key>IO ResourceMatch</key><string ID="2">boot-uuid-media</string></dict>
Got boot drive device=IO Service:/core99PE/pcief2000000/AppleMacRiscPCI/pci-bridge@1f000/KeyLargoATA/ATADeviceNub@1/IOATABlock Storage Driver/Maxter 5T040H4 Media/IO Apple Partition Scheme/G4/400@9
BSD root:disk Os9, major 14, minor 9
jnl: journal start/end pointers reset! (jnl Ox12a6e60; s Ox5cd200 e ox5cd200)
Load of /sbin/launchd, errno 2, trying /sbin/mach_init
Load of /sbin/launchd failed, errno 2

Hope this info helps explain what's wrong!! Help please!

Anyway, so there you have it. I am truely hoping that someone will come along & rescue me from the nightmare & time it would take for a clean install!! You'd be my hero forever!

Please let me know right away if there is anything else I can try or should do. Again, thank you.
Heidi
 
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