Need Start-Up Help STAT!

[SteveO]

Designer friend is coming over in a few minutes with her mid-vintage PowerBook G4. I'm guessing it's 1 mhz AlBook. She is getting extensive startup hangs. I told her to startup from her Install CD and she said there's another CD in the drive (with massive files) that she can't get out due to the bad startup. She said she gets an error saying something like Firewall and/or one that says Looking for Printer. My guess is she has some jobs waiting to print that are clogging up the system.

I know you can usually hold down the mouse button at startup to eject a CD, but is there any other way to manually get that sucker out? I'm afraid we won't even be able to get that far if it is just hanging.

Thanks for any advice!

[PeterB]

Manual eject button? Hold down option key during startup, then use regular eject button?

[Mike Sellers]

Connect it via Firewire to one of your Macs and start it in Firewire Target Disk mode by holding down the "T" key. Maybe the PB hard drive and the CD will show up on yours and you can at least get the files off and then eject the CD.

[C(-)ris]

Holding down the trackpad button at startup will do a software command eject on the CD drive. If the disk is stuck, grab a paperclip, there is a small slit in the fabric on the left side of the CD drive opening. Insert the paperclip straight and you should find the manual eject lever, just push on it and the CD should come out.

As far as the slowness at startup...let us know when you have more info, there are tons of things that can cause slow startups.

[N-OS X-tasy!]

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106752

[SteveO]

Hey, thanks a lot everybody! Wow, I thought Apple did away with the paperclip slot. I was able to get the CD out via holding down the mouse button. After that, it took about 5 minutes to fully boot up. This is I believe a ~1gz G4 PB on 10.3.9. Here's what I found:

1. I ran TT Deluxe (from AppleCare) via CD startup (which also took friggin' forever to boot) and it found nothing wrong, but skipped the "scanning for blocks" step.

2. Repaired Disk Permissions from both a fresh regular startup and from my PB 1.67 startup CD (again, took way too long to startup via holding down the C key)...each attempt resulted in a hang about halfway throught the operation and I had to force restart. Keep in mind she DID NOT KNOW about Repair Disk Permissions at all, so this is probably the first time it was ever run on this machine (at least manually)...so there could be God knows what else mucking things up.

3. After that, I emptied the CD tray and just let it startup by itself. A good 15 or 20 minutes into startup, it was hanging first on something like "Looking for Network Printers" and the blue progress bar; then hanging on "Looking for Printers" and blue progress bar. It didn't mention these warnings at all on the previous two startup attempts, one of which was successful as far as finally getting to the Finder screen.

My friend left at that point -- for the Genius Bar.

I told her I thought maybe there was a print job that was hung up in her queue and needed to be deleted, plus some corruption somewhere. But we had a hard time even getting to the Finder screen, so no dice trying to access Print Utility.

If anybody has any other ideas, I'm all ears. Thanks again...

[PeterB]

Does the machine have an AHT CD to go with it?

If so, I would do that first. Then, I would do DiskWarrior... she probably has severe directory damage. You can do DiskWarrior on the machine with it mounted on the desktop another via Target Disk Mode, which should speed things up considerably.

You might also end up having to reinstall the OS...

[MacMagus]

The stall while accessing the network and network printers is typical of a Mac that was configured to connect to a broadband network and is no longer connected to that network. It's looking for the network on startup and until it times out, you'll end up staring at a gray screen and a progress bar or circular-lines symbol.

Usually, it will finish starting up after a few minutes (up to 20 minutes, depending on the system).

At that point, to prevent the problem from recurring, you'd just have to use the Network preference panel to create a new Location-preset with just the modem checked off in the Network Port Configurations screen and switch to that location. So long as it's no longer configured to look for a network connection, it will no longer stall during startup.

Creating a new Location setting allows your friend to connect via broadband again by just choosing the Broadband location from the Locations menu under the Apple menu and when she's not connecting via broadband, she can select the modem Location.

If anything were hung up in the print queue (which I doubt), it wouldn't be likely to cause a problem until you tried to print another job. For future reference, Print Center Repair is a useful utility for deleting stuck jobs, resetting pref's and emptying caches.
http://www.fixamac.net/software/pcr3/index.php

...And when a Mac has trouble starting up, try starting in Safe mode by holding down the Shift key on startup. It disables a lot of stuff that could cause problems (not unlike holding down the Shift key while booting in OS 9). It takes longer to boot, but that's because it performs several maintenance and repair routines automatically. Once you've gotten tot he Finder in Safe Mode, you can run the Disk Utility to verify the disk and repair permissions. As a general rule, it's better to repair permissions while booted from the volume that you are repairing.

[SteveO]

Great, thanks, MacMagus. I will pass it on to her.

Peter -- what's an AHT CD? She does have the original startup CD.

No have DW; all I have is the OS9 version. I had read DW is no longer necessary with X. ??? I'm confused there.

[PeterB]

Apple Hardware Test, helps diagnose hardware problems...

Get a copy of DW -- it is essential for fixing disk/drive directory problems in X.