Will not boot up in safe mode

Dave

Do you know anyone with a FireWire iBook or Powerbook, and a FireWire cable? You could then try starting up your machine in Target Disk mode (restart plus hold down the T key), and then getting at your machine's Disk Utility etc that way.

See KB Article ID: 58583 for full details (disconnect all other FW drives etc).

This is a long shot, but I had a similar issue when I had Tiger installed on the HD in drive B (the lower slot) of the PowerMac G5.

If you happen to have Tiger installed on Drive B, try switching the drives, and rebooting with Option held down to select the correct start up disk. Perform a normal boot this way, and go to System Preferences > Startup Disk to make sure you have the right disk selected. If so, then try the safe boot again.

Of course, if you don't have Tiger on a second hard drive, this won't apply.

I just had an issue like this. I was able to boot up with an external firewire drive, although it was a lot of trouble. I think doing an option boot finally worked; holding down the option key, I eventually got to see the firewire drive was bootable, and booted from it.

I put the thing in verbose boot mode (command - v , I think; but please look it up. I have no Mac books at work to check). In verbose mode, you could see that the hard drive could not mount; the OS tried to do fsck, but it failed around 2/3 of the way, and the CPU was halted.

I was occasionally able to boot normally, but never in safe or single user modes; these do a disk test first, which invariably failed.

I could see from the system and console logs when I managed to get the firewire boot going that there were repeated errors trying to access drive s03, the internal SATA drive. The logs on the SATA drive showed huges numbers of errors. At a wild guess, for some reason a lot of sectors went bad all at once. There had been a some erratic behavior before, but I'd put that down to the single processor G5 problems. (these were non video related, just freezes).

Applecare wanted me to carry the huge thing into the local Apple store, but I persuaded them to just send me a replacment hard drive, which they did. The new one works perfectly.

PowerMac G5 1.8 SP (late 2004), 1.42 mhz 14 iBook Mac OS X (10.4.3) both with 1.5 GB Ram

The situation makes us to consider "drastic" matters. Did you try Apple Hardware Test (in Loop mode) disc to diagnose a major hardware, as well as "fsck -fy" solution?

You may need to try "Erase and Install" with Zero data option. If this fails or even succeed it but if you cannot run it, there is a (or two) hardware component problem such as logic board, power management unit, the related cable, or memory module.

Let me know about the exact status for the below items when you cannot boot into a safe mode.

1. Power status light (the LED indicator)
2. Fan spin
3. HDD's spin
4. Display
5. Boot tone

Hi Dave,

things to try:

1. reset NVRAM - restart then hold down option cmd p r

2. Try pulling the user/prefs folder out and put on the desktop

3. reset motherboard PMU
( http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=300341)

sorry your having issues but let us know how any of this advice may have helped...

Cheers,

Chris Chamberlain

G5 iMac will boot to login in screen - just blue screen with cursor. Will not boot into safe mode. Reset NVRAM (option cmd p r) but still no go. Stuck.

Hi Christine.
did you find any solution to your problem?
I'm having the same problem right now with a PowerBook (Gigabyte Ethernet).

any comments will be greatly appreciated.


thanks

Ricardo

Hi Ricardo,

Yes I did find a solution to my problem which was I could not get the login screen to show up and could not boot into safe mode to troubleshoot it. Here's what I did:

1. Turn off the computer
2. Get ready to hit the Shift key but not yet
3. Turn on the computer AND AS SOON as you hear the startup tone, press and hold the Shift key. IMMEDIATELY after the tone, NOT before.
4. When the login screen appears, log in. This may take a few extra seconds.
5. Shut down and restart

I found this tip combing through the apple site. Visited so many pages I cannot remember which one it was. But this proceedure did the trick. Hope it helps.

Christine

Thanks a lot Christine,
it worked perfect!

Ricardo

I am having the same problem. I am trying to do an upgrade to an application but the installer program hangs up at the installation. I was told to retry the installer in "Safe Mode" but when I try to start up in Safe Mode, by holding down the Shift key after the tone, a few moments go by and then the computer shuts off.

Please see my Jan 11 response to Ricardo. I believe this will fix your problem.

Christine

Yes, I have tried that and it didn't work. The computer starts up and I do as you explained and shortly thereafter the computer shuts down.