Stalling during startup

My PowerBook G4 currently stalls during startup (a dark grey apple on a light grey bground with a circling sun). I have tried holding down the C key as my Mac starts up and then clicking the hard disk icon and then the right arrow (my Mac just stalls on the grey apple again once I've done this). I have also tried Disk Utility and the Apple Hardware Test. Neither identifies any errors, except when I try to Repair disk permissions Disk Utility reports an Internal Error - 'Disk Utility has lost its connection with the Disk Management Tool and cannot continue'. I have tried restarting the process many times but I always get this same message.

The problem began when I attempted to export a QuickTime movie in QT Pro as an MPEG-4. I attempted to resave the MPEG-4 as a QT movie afterwards. QT then created a gastronomically huge .mov file when I attempted to do this. A file in the region of 32GB! (It should have been less than 1MB). My computer crashed after it told me my hard disk was almost full (there is now only 2.7GB free). This has happened to me before but normally what I can do is restart my Mac and then delete the offending .mov file, however this time I can't even get into my Mac to do this.

I don't want to format my hard disk as I did this only last week after a problem with OS Tiger that I subsequently deleted and reverted back to OS Panther. I have created a lot of work since then that I haven't backed up anywhere else.

If anyone has any ideas… I'd be v v grateful

leo

it sounds to me like your harddrive might be toast. hopefully someone will come in and say that i am wrong.

I think my HD is probably too full (or thinks it's too full) for the OS to function at all. I need to find a way of deleting that oversized file. Any suggestions?

leo

there is a way to boot into a terminal window. i am not sure what it is. if you are familiar with unix, you can navigate to teh file and remove it. i dont remember how to boot to the terminal though.

ps - is this you? http://www.leoearle.com/simeon/animations/4/site.htm

You can boot into single user mode (unix command line interface), rebooting your system and pressing the apple command key and the s key. Once you cat at the command line. You will need to navigate to what the 32GB file is. If you know the name of the file you can do the following to find and delete the file.

find / -name "the name of your file here" -exec rm -i {} \;

If you file name has a space in it enter it like this: "the\ name\ of\ your\ file\ here". The backslash is used as escape character telling the system to ignore the next character. Don't forget to use the double quotes if you have space in your file name. The commad will search your system at the root of the file system. When it find the file it will ask you do you want to remove it.

Once you have removed the file, enter reboot at the command line prompt and your system will restart.

I would also suggest a fsck -fy from the single user mode.

(command + s on startup as noted by rman)

Keep running it until it says there are no errors, sometimes it takes a couple of passes.

Vicky