Perpetual boot up screen

[bigfefan]

I've got this iMac sitting next to me. Early 2009 model, and I have Snow Leopard on it. I logged into an account about 8 minutes ago, and it showed that video that Macs normally show the first time you start them up (with all the languages saying "welcome"). Of course this scared the **** out of me and I unplugged the mac for fear that it would erase my partition or something. I turned it on and it's stuck at the gray boot menu with the gray apple logo and that gray spinner thing underneath. I tried turning on again and it's still at that.

I have a Windows partition, so I restarted and held down ALT. My Mac partition still has its neat little custom icon I gave it, so my Mac partition is not erased entirely (by the way, Windows 7 has been doing a lot of boot-up disk checks lately). I also have MacDrive on my Windows partition, and when I go into the Mac partition, nothing seems to be wrong. Nobody's documents or photos are missing and it's all good.

I just remember deleting the following folders at the root of the partition under a root account shortly before logging into that account where the video showed up:

• Applications (Mac OS 9)
• User Guides and Information (from old Mac)
• sh (pretty sure this had to do with some program for installing linux apps. it was never there before i installed that, and now that program's been deleted for a long time, so i just ditched the sh folder.)
• maybe something else from that old installation of Mac OS 9, i forgot

My Windows 7 partition has no viruses (I just scanned, believe me) and that's working fine. But I'm very concerned about this Mac partition that refuses to go past that gray boot screen. This is a family computer, and other users have thousands of photos, video projects, and music libraries that they'd certainly like to keep. I see my last resort as using the Windows partition to back up everything in the Mac partition to one of our HUGE neglected external hard drives, and then just erase the Mac partition and reinstall Snow. But do I really have to do that, or is there an unbelievably stupid solution I overlooked?

 

[Lifeisabeach]

I've got this iMac sitting next to me. Early 2009 model, and I have Snow Leopard on it. I logged into an account about 8 minutes ago, and it showed that video that Macs normally show the first time you start them up (with all the languages saying "welcome"). Of course this scared the **** out of me and I unplugged the mac for fear that it would erase my partition or something. I turned it on and it's stuck at the gray boot menu with the gray apple logo and that gray spinner thing underneath. I tried turning on again and it's still at that.

I have a Windows partition, so I restarted and held down ALT. My Mac partition still has its neat little custom icon I gave it, so my Mac partition is not erased entirely (by the way, Windows 7 has been doing a lot of boot-up disk checks lately). I also have MacDrive on my Windows partition, and when I go into the Mac partition, nothing seems to be wrong. Nobody's documents or photos are missing and it's all good.

I just remember deleting the following folders at the root of the partition under a root account shortly before logging into that account where the video showed up:

• Applications (Mac OS 9)
• User Guides and Information (from old Mac)
• sh (pretty sure this had to do with some program for installing linux apps. it was never there before i installed that, and now that program's been deleted for a long time, so i just ditched the sh folder.)
• maybe something else from that old installation of Mac OS 9, i forgot

My Windows 7 partition has no viruses (I just scanned, believe me) and that's working fine. But I'm very concerned about this Mac partition that refuses to go past that gray boot screen. This is a family computer, and other users have thousands of photos, video projects, and music libraries that they'd certainly like to keep. I see my last resort as using the Windows partition to back up everything in the Mac partition to one of our HUGE neglected external hard drives, and then just erase the Mac partition and reinstall Snow. But do I really have to do that, or is there an unbelievably stupid solution I overlooked?

Since you have an early 2009 model iMac, there's no reason for you to have had any Mac OS 9 folders. OS 9 can't run on these Intel Macs, and certainly doesn't even come with Snow Leopard. Unless you somehow migrated those over from a PPC-based Mac, then there's a fair chance you deleted something you shouldn't have. I suspect that deleting /Library might cause the intro video to launch on reboot since OS X would have to rebuild that to a virgin state and effectively reset you to a "new" installation status.

As for MacDrive… do you have the latest version? Someone else here recently had OS X issues that resolved when she updated MacDrive.

 

[bigfefan]

Since you have an early 2009 model iMac, there's no reason for you to have had any Mac OS 9 folders. OS 9 can't run on these Intel Macs, and certainly doesn't even come with Snow Leopard. Unless you somehow migrated those over from a PPC-based Mac, then there's a fair chance you deleted something you shouldn't have. I suspect that deleting /Library might cause the intro video to launch on reboot since OS X would have to rebuild that to a virgin state and effectively reset you to a "new" installation status.

As for MacDrive… do you have the latest version? Someone else here recently had OS X issues that resolved when she updated MacDrive.

Um um ummmmm yeah. Migrations go all the way back to a '99 model iMac so that's why those are there. I didn't delete the Library folder at the system root. And in my OPing, I only mentioned MacDrive to show everyone that my files are safe.

I solved the problem myself, actually. I popped in the 10.5 install disk that came with the iMac and did an "Archive and Install." Then I followed Apple's instructions for recovering everyone's home folders (you make a junk administrator, get in under root, and move everyone's home folders into the users folder, then make accounts with the same short name as the folder and tell it to use that folder). It took me 6 hours to do all that, run my upgrades, and figure out that I needed to install iLife '09 to get iPhoto working, but the whole process cleaned about 60 GB of junk files and everything is safe and working again.

/solved