Gray apple screen and no progress wheel

I have a G3 wallstreet that was running on 10.2.9 and running stable. I upgraded the hard drive to a WD Scorpio 80 GB. everything was going great I got my new battery, booted up and ran a software update. I needed a new quick time and itunes so I installed and restarted. At restart it chimes then shows the smiling computer then goes black chimes and shows the apple icon on a grey screen. The wheel will only show up when I load with a Norton Utilites, or an Apple OS disk. I ran Norton and disk first aid several times the thing just wont boot past that screen.

PowerBook G3 Wallstreet, Mac OS X (10.2.x)

Posted on Aug 1, 2006 5:11 PM

38 replies

Sep 19, 2006 1:59 PM in response to Devin Jackson

The computer would have never booted up without the <8GB boot disk.</div>

Actually, as long as all the OS components needed during startup were located within the first 8GB of space, it MAY have worked. So your initial Mac OS X installation and immediate OS updates would likely have been under the limit, since nothing else was on the drive. As soon as a later updater or installer (like QuickTime) put some of those OS components above the 8GB limit, it would stop working. So it's possible this "weird event" happened when the "data" (your music and docs) was copied onto the hard drive. Any updates performed after that point would have placed OS components above the limit.

But it doesn't explain the "weird event." A new battery would not affect partitioning in any way I can imagine.

Sep 21, 2006 3:12 PM in response to Kenichi Watanabe

I have to assume that the issue was the automatic optimizer. If I didn't have enough Memory on that partition the Installs would not have even began much less been able to finish. Had a max out caused that partition to crash, the information would not have moved, it would only just dissapear (become unreadable). The music files were copied to this disk several weeks before and had ran and booted up since then more than once. The fact that the entire disk is readable (no missing 7GB partition) suggests that whatever was the last item to write on the Hard drive caused the issue (nothing else even ran during that boot up). If this is the case I will have to report it to Apple.

Sep 21, 2006 5:55 PM in response to Devin Jackson

I have no inside information about how the "optimize" routine at the end of update installations works, but I believe it only updates program linking, something done to make launching programs faster. If it did things like move data around the hard drive and update partitioning, it should warn you that you need to perform a backup of data first, in case something bad happens (like a power outage).

In fact, if the updater program crashes or hangs during the optimize part of the installation (after it completes installation of files), you can normally restart and not do anything else. The program linking gets updated through normal use.

In your case, if something unusual happened, I don't think the optimize routine used by the updater was involved. But I don't know the technical details, so I could be wrong about that...

Sep 23, 2006 10:06 AM in response to Kenichi Watanabe

At this point I am reasonably sure that the issue is with the software and not the hardware. I am running a similar WD on the iMac and have had no issues with it. All of the programs on the laptop are Apple with the exception of Digital Performer 4 (DP4) and Peak. During the last bootup no programs, other Software Update, ran. The very last thing to run was the optimizer, I felt it was taking a while but that is reasonable considering that 384MB is the maximum RAM availible, and that it was optimizing 52GB of data on two discs only capable of 75GB combined. If I had to hazard a guess at this point the only culprit I can see is the software.

Sep 23, 2006 10:17 AM in response to Devin Jackson

I lied, shortly after that last post I remembered that I had hooked up an APC ups system. The laptop is not on the ups side, and is only using the unit as a surge protector. The iMac and the PowerPC are both on the ups side of the unit, but only the PowerPC is hooked up to the unit from the USB. My cable is also being surged through this unit. I don't see how the unit could erase a partition, while leaving all of the information, but I wonder if with the new battery it detected the ups. I saw nothing to indicate that the unit was causing an issue, or even that the laptop noticed it was there. I still feel that the problem was software related, but if someone has any info about ups causing similar problems I am open to the idea.

Sep 23, 2006 10:36 AM in response to Devin Jackson

I have been watching this forum and am struck by the number of people (running OSX) who are telling us that they are having hard drive issues shortly after running software update.
Mark Leszczynski1
leo_dbard
nottmbantam who lost new harddrive in a G5 iMac
myself and I'm sure countless others who are intimidated by forums like these.

I think it is time to let Apple know about this.

Sep 23, 2006 3:14 PM in response to Devin Jackson

I think it is important to note that people with problems will report the problem and seek assistance here. People who do not have problems will not start a topic to say they successfully installed an update.

I have a Power Mac G5 (10.4), Pismo PowerBook (10.3), and an old tray-loader iMac (10.3), and I have never had a problem with Software Update.

That being said, it is possible that the oldest supported hardware, such as a Wallstreet, receives less attention in testing by Apple.

Sep 23, 2006 7:01 PM in response to Kenichi Watanabe

I am in no way suggesting that it is a chronic problem. I am just interested to see that it is happening to more than one person. I have run and installed updates on both the PowerMac and iMac (1st gen. Tray loader) since then without issue. They were running 10.3 and the PowerBook was on 10.2. I do think it is odd that I am not the only person that experienced this after running update. I am not sure that it is an issue because some of these people are running different OS. It just seems that Apple is usually on top of things like this. I don't spend alot of time in these forums but a Hard Drive crash without cause (incompatible software, conflicting extentions, dropping, etc... ) seems pretty unusual.

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Gray apple screen and no progress wheel