I have a Mac Mini running 10.3.7 and it no longer boots. The boot process stalls with the following message, "waiting for printing services". When I boot into safe mode either, it hangs with a different error message, "Login Window starting"
I booted it in target mode and ran Disk Utility and it found no errors.
I would like to try and diagnose this surgically (for my own knowledge) and avoid a re-installation of the OS.
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yes you can.. ..target boot the problem mac.
can you hook it up to a macintosh with the same major OS version? 10.3.x?
once the filesystem is mounted on the other macintosh, go to the command line, type "df -k" and look at the result - find the device details for the mounted, problem filesystem
then type "fsck /dev/disk2s1" of course substitute /dev/disk2s1 with whatever the device name is for you disk.. ..then see what happens...
you know strung that's a good question.. ..i am a bit of a purist when it comes to fsck and I know that disk utility is supposed to just be a GUI disk check which, theoretically, does the same thing, but I have had differing results from both.
i've seen disk utility fly through the disk check with no problems, then run fsck from the command line in single user mode and had all sorts of weird mismatched blocks come up. All I can say is, I would give it a try. After that, if I still get problems, I would move onto a third party disk checker - something like diskwarrior or drive genius..
From the threads I have been reading, it seems it is unlikely that the cause or cure is disk corruption. The cause seems to be either mismatched system software file versions or a corrupted system file. In either, case absent identifying the specific file that is causing the problem and replacing it, an archive and install seems to be the best fix.
One Hail Mary the you might want to try first, though, is to install the 10.3.9 combo updater by target disk mode. If you are lucking this update might replace the problem file and save you an archive and install:
http://www.apple.c
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by: roylongPosted on 2009-09-26 at 12:10:11ID: 25431125
can you boot into single user mode and run fsck ?