iBook no boot after 10.4.10

Question

iBook no boot after 10.4.10

Hello all,

I'm trying to help a buddy with his iBook woes. He has the g4 model 1.33Ghz, 14 inch screen.

Apparently his issue began today. I'm assuming the problems began after updating to 10.4.10 because the machine never had any issues before. The machine was able to start up earlier today but iTunes stopped working. Sometime later he tried to startup again and no luck. The machine would go past the apple logo. The blue screen would come up. The mouse pointer would appear for sometime. The it would disappear and the spinning gear would show up. It would stick at that screen forever.

I machine boots just fine from an external firewire drive with an install of OS 10.4.8. This means there isn't any hardware issues and led me to conclude that the recent update is the culprit. The machine has filevault active and so far I am unable to access his user account when booting from the external drive. I may be able to get another mac to try Target Disk Mode if I have to reformat. Any help to resolve this issue will be greatly appreciated.

I have unsuccessfully tried several troubleshooting steps including:

/sbin/fsck -fy and the steps on this link http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106464#symp1

Message was edited by: Shaka St. Ange

Posted on Aug 4, 2007 4:33 PM

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Answer 1

cornelius

Level 6

17,826 points

Aug 4, 2007 7:55 PM in response to Shaka St. Ange

Shaka St. Ange:

The first order of business is to see if you can secure the data. I avoid FileVault like the plague, and suggest that others do, too, unless they can justify why they need it, and understand how the feature works. In this case, of course, the damage has been done. To be able to expand the encrypted data file you will need twice as much space as the Users Folder occupies. Here's what I suggest:
1. Boot into Firewire Target Disk Mode with the affected computer as the Target and the other mac as host.
2. Attach an external firewire HDD to the host computer with a partition to accommodate the entire volume plus half again the Users folder.
3. Use SuperDuper to make a bootable clone of the Target disk on the external FW HDD.
4. Boot the host computer from the cloned volume on the external FW HDD.
5. Turn off File Vault.

At this point the backup can remain on the external HDD. Then I suggest reformat, zero all data and either re-installation and restore, or clone back to the target computer from the external FW HDD.

Please do post back with further questions or comments.

Good luck.

cornelius

Message was edited by: cornelius

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Answer 2

Aug 4, 2007 8:21 PM in response to cornelius

From your description there seems to be no work around for the no boot issue.

I ran the machine in verbose mode and this is what it had to say. "Aug 4 23:08:57 localhost diskarbitrationd[12701]: Could not create System Configuration notification port."

It did that for some minutes. The time and I assume port number changed as time progressed. The 12701 is the last nmber it spat out and the machine does not progress any further.

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Answer 3

Aug 4, 2007 8:51 PM in response to Shaka St. Ange

I booted from my external drive, downloaded and reinstalled the 10.4.10 Combo update for 10.4.10. Lo and behold, the machine actually booted this time.It seems that the update may not have been applied properly.

THanks for the help.

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Answer 4

cornelius

Level 6

17,826 points

Aug 5, 2007 9:30 AM in response to Shaka St. Ange

Shaka St. Ange:

Thanks for posting back with an update. Glad that worked for you. I normally would recommend installing the Combo update as a first measure. However, FileVault makes it difficult to rescue data in case things go terribly wrong, and thus my first concern was for your data. A few of recommendations:

1. Unless you need the level of security that FileVault provides, I suggest that you turn it off before you are unable to do it in a pinch.
2. Be sure you always have an up-to-date backup of your entire HDD on an external Firewire HDD.
3. Remember to Repair Disk Permissions before and after installations.
4. Run Maintenance procedures regularly. Here are some helpful sites:
Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance
Mac OS X 10.3/10.4: System maintenance
Maintaining OS X
Tuning Mac OS X Performance

Be sure to post back or post a new topic should you have further questions or a new question.

Cheers.

cornelius

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