What ails this Mac?

I was asked to take a look at a Mac today, and it seems to be in quite a bit of trouble. I know some of you have spent a lot more time with Macs than I have so I thought I'd throw this open and get some suggestions.

The Mac is a tower G4 (I think..), couple of years old at least. Runs OSX, takes forever to boot. Like, literally forever. We reset the Mac and stood there and talked about Many, Many Things (most of which had nothing to do with the computer ) for half an hour. It didn't actually manage to finish booting during that time. That's unbelievable...

When it does finish 'booting' instead of the regular Apple login GUI, it dumps us to the Darwin/BSD text login prompt with no GUI at all. Very unexpected - I've never seen my own Mac* do this. According to them, sometimes when they reboot it often enough, it does successfully get to the GUI.

(* Mac Mini 1.25Ghz.. spends most of its time sleeping while I work on my x86 boxes. Only Mac I've ever owned and I don't spend much time with it)

Doesn't recognize any of the existing usernames/passwords that the owners know either, I tried the whole lot (root, usernames, etc.etc.etc.) didn't work.

I THINK (guessing at this time) it is a marginal hard disk that is corrupted and failing and that would best be replaced soon. Of course, I recommended that they try reinstalling OSX from original media first, just in case the damage is software only, and not hardware.

Any tips? I would like to try and help, but I don't know enough to say conclusively what's wrong with it.

I agree that it sounds like a hardware issue.

the easiest way to have this solved is to bring it to the applestore and let them deal with it. of course, if your friends don't have applecare, or the warranty is over.... you can try the Hardware test CD (should have come with the mac)

pop that badboy in to the computer and start it up with that.

instructions here: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=31241

If the drive is truly dead, you can just pop in a new HD (IDE or SATA, depends on your machine) and re-install using the CDs

if the drive is still good, and you want to try and reformat your way out of it, repartition the drive in to 2 partitions and back to 1 so that the partition table gets completely rewritten. then erase and install with any version of OS X. this is because a regular install does not rewrite the FAT table thus.. you need to use the disk utility while booting from the cd

by the way.. i hope your friends have backed up all their data. it sucks to lose documents and pictures.

Get a copy of Disk Warrior. It may be able to repair it.

Sounds more like software corruption to me. You can boot to Disk Warrior and then run the diagnostics.

Also try zapping the PRAM. Restart computer, (Immediately hold down command,option, P,and R keys ) listen for startup chimes. Continue holding until it does this 3-4 times.

There have been a couple or three vulnerability exploit warnings for the Mac in the last couple of weeks. I don't know what the symptoms are for sure. I remember one sign of being infected is loss of file associations.

Thanks guys, I appreciate the recommendations. Will relay your advice to him tomorrow.

Similar on my imac G3 10.3.9, corrupted after norton speedisk, had to re-install, then everything ok.

Not a hardware issue. I can tell you that right now. Long boot up times on Macs are rarely caused by hardware issues, and when they are, it's almost always an ailing peripheral device that's the cause. If you had a bona-fide HW issue, it either wouldn't pass the P.O.S.T. tests done during system startup ( and would likely give you a series of error chimes to indicate the problem ), or you would notice something drastically wrong once booted that could obviously be traced back to hardware ( like distorted video, hard-freezes & memory related Kernel Panics, or noises coming from the drives that even non-techies know are just baaaaaad ).

This is a case of directory corruption on the catalog tree of the drive. Stevie Ray's suggestion to run Disk Warrior is the correct first step. And after that, run Disk Utility and perform a Permissions Repair on the drive. Do not rely on the built in Disk Utility for anything other than permissions repairs, as it is almost completely useless for repairing catalog/directory tree errors. These are the first two steps in the diagnostic process ( given the symptoms you've described ) to see if you can get the system back. You don't need to zap the PRAM for these particular symptoms, as it won't do anything to help the boot issues other than set your computer's clock back to 1972. However, if you don't mind resetting your clock and possibly your video resolution, it won't hurt anything either, so go ahead if it tickles your fancy.


Keep in mind however, the directory information may simply be too damaged to 'repair' and some system data may already have been lost. In that latter case, you should make a backup copy of the User's folder ( located at the root of the drive ), which will contain all of the users' Home directories on the machine. Also ask the individual if they save files outside of their home directory and back those files up as well. Then try what's called an "Archive and Install" while selecting "Preserve User and Network Settings". This is a feature on all of the latest MacOS install disks ever since 10.2, I believe.

Once that's completed, run Disk Warrior & Permissions Repair over the drive again. If there are no significant changes in the system's behavior or if it is still acting buggy, it's time for a reformat and reinstall ( once again, be sure you've backed up all of the user's non-system files, located within the /Users folder, before reformatting the drive ). Some helpful articles to assist you in your adventure are as follows:

Quick emergency procedure, if you have two macs, or firewire elsewhere, start up your ailing mac with T key depressed, to start it up in remote server mode, to access and backup any data, from other computer, via firewire cable.

Having said that, when mine has crashed following norton, (3 times so far, will I never learn) I have never lost any data, files, photo's, mail boxes, bookmarks etc, but have had to re-install some drivers, printers, media players etc.

Mac is quite robust, just falls over occasionally, but not usually catastrophic, unless video board or Hard Disk fails

Good luck