turning on sound in safe mode?

Hi Kappy, I appreciate your concern, and I realise that under normal circumstances this would be a very bad idea, but Im a bit stuck at the moment. Im on the move at the moment (no more than 4 days in any one city, so no time to leave the machine to be looked at) and dont have the funds to buy a new copy of the OS. As soon as I get back home, a full re-install is first on my list of things to do. However, in the interim, Im trying to get as close to full use out of my machine as possible.

Do you have any idea if my original question is a possibility?

Much thanks for the help.

Hi Kappy,
Thanks for the advice, that's great. One problem, what does it mean if I don't have an AppleHDA.kext file in my extensions folder? I haven't knowingly done anything to modify which .kext files are in there, but it's definitely in there at the moment. In case it makes a difference, i'm running 10.4.11, not 10.5.

Sorry, Kappy. I didn't phrase that in the clearest way possible. What I meant to say was that I do not have AppleHDA.kext in my systems/library/extensions folder. I've never intentionally looked for or moved that extension before, and obviously I have not knowingly deleted it. I'm running 10.4.11, in case that makes a difference (perhaps this kext only exists in 10.5?).

Is this a considerable issue?

As a final (hopefully) update, the problems I was having with my G4 failing to start-up normally began to recur about two months after I had it serviced at a Mac retailer in Bangkok. I was able to get things started in Safe Mode, which worked well for the next few months, but a few weeks ago, Safe Mode crashed as well, and everything I tried (with the exception of Single User Mode) resulted in a grey screen with horizontal lines across it (seemingly an indication of a hardware problem).

Well, after a bit of nosing around on the internet and in a few other forums, I can across the keen idea of going into Single User Mode and removing video-related kext files from the systems/library/extensions folder (very dangerous stuff, I know), sort of like what I was trying to do with the booting the audio kexts to get sound running in safemode (as discussed earlier in this forum). I did this one at a time, to see if I could find out what might be causing the problem. First I discovered the importance of the NVDANV30Hal.kext file (removing it stopped the start up process entirely for normal and safe mode).

Then I made the critical discovery. By removing the NVDAResman.kext file from the extensions folder, my machine is now miraculously able to start up in normal mode with no noticeable side effects except for an inability for the machine to be put to sleep. If it's between a completely non-functional machine, and one that can't sleep, I'll take the latter.

Hopefully this little discovery might be able to help others in a similar situation (video hardware crash on startup).

Also, if any of you know any define known problems that will come about from yanking the Resman kext, I'd love to be properly warned 🙂 ?

thanks much,
tim