HELP! My old imac (that I just gave to my daughter and just ran out of

[Emillereid]

extended warranty) won't finish booting up. The apple is there and the blue bar scrolls along til almost the end but gets stuck with an eighth of an inch to go -- it says it's loading startup window. Apparently the computer had just done an update and she was re-starting. Unfortunately she thinks maybe one of the items (safari?) didn't finish it's update. What to do? I'll come back tomorrow morning. Any help appreciated! Thanks.

[politicat]

1. Try starting it up in Safe Boot Mode.

This is how you Start Up in Safe Mode:

Be sure the computer is turned off.

Now press the power button.

Just after you hear the startup tone (NOT BEFORE), press and hold the down the shift key.

Now release the shift key when you see the start up screen whit the gray background with the Apple logo and the progress indicator.

During the startup, you will see "Safe Boot" on the Mac OS X startup screen.

To leave the Mac OS X Safe Mode just restart you Mac normally, without holding any keys during the startup period.

If you do this every so often it will keep your Mac happy and healthy.

[Emillereid]

2. Thanks. I'll give it a try and report back.

[Emillereid]

3. Unfortunately it got hung up in the same place during safe boot --

at the end of the blue bar when it gets to 'startup window' HELP! Any other suggestions?

[politicat]

4. Use the software restore disk and the hardware test disk

You should have a hardware test disk somewhere and you really want to shove that in the optical drive and make sure the hardware is okay.

If you want to try to recover some data before you use the restore disk, and it has a firewire port, use a second machine to open the disk in Firewire target mode (To connect two Macs together via FireWire Target Disk Mode, turn both off. Turn one on (the one you DON'T want to appear as a drive on the other) and let it fully boot up. Then turn on the other and hold down the T key. A little graphic should appear in the middle of the screen on the client computer indicating it is in target disk mode, and the drive of the client computer should then appear on the other computer.) This may or may not work - if you can see the hard drive of the malfunctioning one on the one that's working, then you can back up the data on the malfunctioning one. If you can't, then you're going to lose data.

Once you've done that, then use the software restore disk that came with the imac and restore the software (or use the most recent copy of your OS software).

[Emillereid]

5. I finally just did a re-install. Didn't lose anything.

Restore just seemed too drastic.

Turns out the problem originated with the latest update -- especially the update for itunes. With the updated itunes in the applications folder it wouldn't let me run disk utility permission repairs even from a disk. If one places the itunes app on the desktop instead it will let you run disk utility. Go figure. Strange fix, but it worked.

The latest update seems to be causing all sorts of problems. My husband's powerbook also had disk utility problems until I placed the itunes app on the desktop -- but it still has airport issues. Can't pick up the signal. There's nothing wrong with the signal as my new iMac G5 picks it up just fine.

[politicat]

6. Ours are doing fine....

I don't know.

(Heh. For us, a software restore is not at all drastic, but a reinstall is the last resort.... Different strokes, I guess.)

[leftofthedial]

7. everytime I update Safari

it breaks something

usually it wipes out all my Internet settings and I can't get online until I manually reset everything.