Last week, I bought a used 2003 800Mhz, 256MB RAM G3 iBook from BetaMacs.com, running OS X 10.4.11. It had a tendency to lock up to the degree (normally when I had certain applications open, like Firefox) that the system would not respond unless I rebooted it. Last night, those problems came to a head when I had restarted my computer after the Dashboard froze up when I was trying to install a widget. I was able to get as far as the blue Mac OS X progress bar before the system locked, stuck on a blue screen with a cursor. I was able to move the cursor, but there were no progress indicators, like the spinning wait cursor. My desktop, the Dock and its icons were not able to appear. I tried rebooting the system to see if it were just an isolated occurrence, but every instance brought up the same problem.
I went online on another computer, and went to find solutions. I tried running Safe Mode, but Safe Mode produced the same problems that normal booting did--I was still displayed a blue screen with a cursor after the startup routines.
I had wondered if it were a hard drive problem, but have tried using single-user mode to run fsck, which told me that my file system was 'OK'. I then tried booting from Single User Mode to see if the GUI would be bypassed, but after the boot sequence was completed, Aqua started itself up, and took me to the blue screen with the cursor. I also attempted to change the Netinfo settings, which allowed me to create a new account, but did not permit me to log in--rather, it gave me a blue screen with a cursor similar to the one I saw before, albeit with the OS X Tiger default wallpaper, rather than a plain blue screen. Finally, I tried booting with Verbose Mode to see if I saw anything amiss during the startup sequence, and the only thing that stood out to me were two 'I/O Errors'. Googling around indicated that these could be hard-drive problems, but fsck revealed nothing wrong with the system.
I wonder if I have corrupted the Dashboard by having an incomplete installation there, and because of its constantly running in the background, I cannot log in properly. I found the command-line code to disable the Dashboard, but I cannot use single-user mode to remove it.
The computer did not come with an OS X disc, so I cannot run any utilities from it, nor can I reinstall the operating system right now. The only thing I have not done is checking and repairing file permissions, and I am unsure how to do that under single-user mode.
I went online on another computer, and went to find solutions. I tried running Safe Mode, but Safe Mode produced the same problems that normal booting did--I was still displayed a blue screen with a cursor after the startup routines.
I had wondered if it were a hard drive problem, but have tried using single-user mode to run fsck, which told me that my file system was 'OK'. I then tried booting from Single User Mode to see if the GUI would be bypassed, but after the boot sequence was completed, Aqua started itself up, and took me to the blue screen with the cursor. I also attempted to change the Netinfo settings, which allowed me to create a new account, but did not permit me to log in--rather, it gave me a blue screen with a cursor similar to the one I saw before, albeit with the OS X Tiger default wallpaper, rather than a plain blue screen. Finally, I tried booting with Verbose Mode to see if I saw anything amiss during the startup sequence, and the only thing that stood out to me were two 'I/O Errors'. Googling around indicated that these could be hard-drive problems, but fsck revealed nothing wrong with the system.
I wonder if I have corrupted the Dashboard by having an incomplete installation there, and because of its constantly running in the background, I cannot log in properly. I found the command-line code to disable the Dashboard, but I cannot use single-user mode to remove it.
The computer did not come with an OS X disc, so I cannot run any utilities from it, nor can I reinstall the operating system right now. The only thing I have not done is checking and repairing file permissions, and I am unsure how to do that under single-user mode.
