URGENT: Sudden Black Screen On Tiger

My mom was on her mac this morning and when she was asked to update software she pressed quit (install later) as she normally would. After this the screen just turned black.

The mouse was still on and you could see it but there was no response from the keyboard or mouse in anyway. She is hysterical right now since she has non backed up pictures from the past FIVE YEARS of our life.

Does anyone have ANY idea of what it is and what I should do. I think the only thing I can do is restart but my mom doesn't want to take risks with the last five years of our life in pictures.

PLEASE respond ASAP!!!

Thanks,
Luke

Can she remember what the message was?

You can probably only restart is my guess. How about CMD-OPT-ESC to see if anything is still running and maybe force the quit?

If she really quit Software Update without launching the install then stopping it in mid process, there shouldn't be a problem with a restart. Although I can't say this is a usual behaviour.

If worst comes to worse, you can always pop in the optical drive the restore disk and boot from it.

Can you give us the full specs of the computer, which OS version, etc.?

We "took a risk" and rebooted. It works fine. Thanks anyway. We're now going to back it all up Learn our lesson! Thanks again.

Luke

I have had similar thing happen but mine was the back light turning off, don't know why, it freaked me out but then I hit the brightness button and it came back.