Unable to log on

Hi,

I tried with the disc I have, and the installer will only allow the install to continue if I format the disk first, owing to the fact that the version installed on the hard disk is newer.

I haven't forgotten the password, I know it, the system, or at least OS X is acting rather strange - entering a wrong password before I went and did the (seemingly stupid) thing of deleting the /Library/Preferences folders resulted in the normal behaviour of the password window shaking - now trying to enter anything at all results in the system, or at least the LoginWindow process (or whatever it is in 10.4) completely locking up and the rainbow cursor comes up on the screen as if to say the system is going to do something, but leaving it doesn't do anything - it threw up a kernel panic once, but this seems no longer the case.

I have a feeling that more than likely the easy way out of this would be to just start all over again - hardly surprising considering that it isn't even a 'proper' install, it's a copy of an installation taken from a smaller drive, which was taken originally from an even smaller drive

Hi,

The keyboard works fine - it's working in OS 9, also I got OS X to a point where I could quickly enter the password in the box before the system focused on it (there's a delay on my system, probably owing to it's quite low speed), however clicking the login button resulted in the same symptom - LoginWindow locking up to the rainbow cursor.

Hi all,

Thanks for your suggestions, unfortunately none of them seemed to clear anything up with OS X - by the looks of it something had corrupted something important, rendering the system unusable. Or, at least, that was the case when I originally asked - I came to the system today to see if I could make any sense of the install, only to find the hard drive isn't working anymore - something electronically wrong with it (spins up and makes normal noises, but isn't detected on either primary or secondary controller - both controllers are fine as they both detect the CD drive). By the looks of it, failure or no failure, the easy way out would definitely have been to just reinstall the system from scratch.