When I power up powerbook G4, everything looks fine, desktop, icons, finder menu, mouse movement. as soon as I click on something, I get a neverending spinning color wheel. Have used this computer for years and have not added or deleted any programs recently.
Is this ahardware or software problem? How do I correct?
PowerBook
First try a safe boot (hold down shift key at power up) which will run the Unix fsck file system test and repair utility on your boot volume. If that doesn't help, then you might want to try doing that from single user mode.
Single User mode and fsck
Boot computer holding down the cmd-S key combination until you get a black Unix terminal screen with white lettering.
First type the following command:
/sbin/mount -uw / <cr>
This makes the boot volume writable.
Then type this command:
/sbin/fsck -fy <cr>
Watch the display to see if it reports any problems. If it does and says that the problems were fixed, then enter the same command. It may be necessary to do this a couple of times until you get a pass where it reports the volume / is OK and no problems were repaired.
When that is done, you can do an elegant reboot with the following command:
shutdown -r now <cr>
If that doesn't help things out, then it will be time to get the Apple Hardware Test disk out and run that on the machine. (If you don't have the disc for your machine, there are some burnable disc images on Apple's Support site, exactly where, though, I don't recall.)
First try a safe boot (hold down shift key at power up) which will run the Unix fsck file system test and repair utility on your boot volume. If that doesn't help, then you might want to try doing that from single user mode.
Single User mode and fsck
Boot computer holding down the cmd-S key combination until you get a black Unix terminal screen with white lettering.
First type the following command:
/sbin/mount -uw / <cr>
This makes the boot volume writable.
Then type this command:
/sbin/fsck -fy <cr>
Watch the display to see if it reports any problems. If it does and says that the problems were fixed, then enter the same command. It may be necessary to do this a couple of times until you get a pass where it reports the volume / is OK and no problems were repaired.
When that is done, you can do an elegant reboot with the following command:
shutdown -r now <cr>
If that doesn't help things out, then it will be time to get the Apple Hardware Test disk out and run that on the machine. (If you don't have the disc for your machine, there are some burnable disc images on Apple's Support site, exactly where, though, I don't recall.)
Thanks for info. I'm working through it. I've run the single user fsck a number of times. It says HD appears OK and files modified. Each time I run fsck, it seems to find more files to modify.
Problem is still there. I'm going to try Hrdware Test disc as time allows. I will keep you informed
davidfrombowmanville wrote:
Thanks for info. I'm working through it. I've run the single user fsck a number of times. It says HD appears OK and files modified. Each time I run fsck, it seems to find more files to modify.
Problem is still there. I'm going to try Hrdware Test disc as time allows. I will keep you informed
You may need to get something a little stronger than fsck on the case, then. My tool of choice is DiskWarrior from Alsoft, but there are others like Drive Genius that folks like as well.
spinning color wheel
