01-01-2011, 08:50 AM

HI Guys,

I just went to turn my iMac on and When I turned it on it just stayed on the white screen for well over one minute! Then a globe logo popped up and it started flashing on and off! and then after another minute the apple logo showed up ad then it booted up fine! What does that mean?

01-01-2011, 09:00 AM

Originally Posted by MrMacMan56

What does that mean?

Maybe you enjoyed yourself a little too much on New Year's Eve?


No, seriously - it sounds like it might have been trying to do a network boot. Do you have any servers sitting on your network?

01-01-2011, 09:01 AM

It was looking for a network drive to boot from. When it didn't find one, it went ahead and loaded up normally.

Head into System Preferences - Startup Disk.
Make sure your internal drive is selected there.

01-01-2011, 09:06 AM

Thanks Guys! it is perfect now! I am going to kill my 8 year old brother he was on here last night

01-01-2011, 12:58 PM

If your little bro uses the machine often with or without your permission consider setting up a second account that is not an admin account. Let the Mac automatically log into that account. I believe that should you ever need to disable auto login on the fly in this would do it A New Mac Tip Every Day: How to temporarily disable Automatic Login.

01-01-2011, 07:58 PM

I just set up a second account! Is there anyway I can set up a password before it even gets to the logon screen as I don not want him on here at all!

01-01-2011, 08:23 PM

I don't think there is a way to stop things before it gets to the login screen. The closest thing I could come up with was setting an Open Firmware/EFI password but that doesn't prevent booting. Setting up firmware password protection in Mac OS X

There may be other options out there that I am not thinking about at the moment. Until someone comes along with a better idea I'd suggest disabling automatic login on all accounts and making sure you have strong passwords set that he does not know. That way he still has to get past the login screen.

01-01-2011, 09:30 PM

Do not set up Firmware Password unless you are 100% certain guaranteed you will never forget the password. With this enabled should you forget the password, you cannot access the machine with even to install discs.

01-01-2011, 10:35 PM

Has this procedure stopped working? I thought I had seen something some on the Apple boards that it still works. Lost Firmware Password | Ask Jacob

I know it still needs the DVD to change the password but at least it gets you to a point of being able to do that.

01-02-2011, 07:57 PM

@Slydude:

That procedure still works sometimes. It's really unclear why it works on some machines and not on others. You can do a search and get varying results from folks who used that method to get into the machine after a forgotten firmware password.

My own "theory" is that it still works on machines that contain two memory slots but doesn't always work for the newer machines that have more than two slots. ???

01-03-2011, 07:22 PM

I better leave it as it is then!

01-03-2011, 08:44 PM

Originally Posted by chscag

@Slydude:

That procedure still works sometimes. It's really unclear why it works on some machines and not on others. You can do a search and get varying results from folks who used that method to get into the machine after a forgotten firmware password.

My own "theory" is that it still works on machines that contain two memory slots but doesn't always work for the newer machines that have more than two slots. ???

That is an interesting idea. I was thinking that in some of the cases where this was unsuccessful I couldn't tell if the procedure was followed correctly. Specifically, when you remove a stick of memory aren't you supposed to do the pram reset after adding or removing memory sticks?

I'm not explaining myself well so lets use a "real world" example. Suppose I have a Mac with 4 GB of memory and need to remove such a password. I remove one stick leaving 2 GB of memory in the machine. I leave the memory out for a few minutes but never reset the pram before reinserting the ram I removed. That probably doesn't work because since the computer hasn't been reset as far as the computer is concerned nothing has changed.

01-03-2011, 09:55 PM

You may very well be correct about resetting the PRAM after removing one module. Most of the posts I read simply did not go into much detail as to why the procedure failed.

However, I did notice on the later model MacBook Pros which have more than two slots for memory modules, removing one module did not work. That's why I "assumed" it might be related to the number of slots.

I don't have a MBP to try it on but will be getting one a bit later on. (My generous son gave us a Xmas present of an Apple gift card to buy one for our business.)

If you have access to a late model MBP or iMac which has more than two memory slots, give it a try.

01-03-2011, 10:12 PM

Can't help there. Mine is limited to two slots.

BTW does your generous son feel like adopting anyone? I would be happy to help with the efficient use of such gift cards

01-04-2011, 01:03 PM

Interesting! I will have a look online tonight and see if I can find anyone that has done that!