iMac failing to startup into OS 10.3.9?

On Fri, 27 Jun 2008, A Great & Mighty ... wrote:

> I've an old, CRT based iMac that I can't seem to get to properly
> boot-up into OS 10.3.9?

Are you asking or asserting this? :-)

I'll get into detail below, but the best starting point for questions
like this is Apple's support site.

  Your Mac won't start up in Mac OS X (Mac OS X 10.3.9 or earlier)
  http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1411

That article gets into a lot of detail about how to proceed here. It's
better advice than anything I or anyone else can give you based on the
information at hand at the moment.

That said, my bad advice follows: :-)

> All was fine, until I ran Norton System Works

Oops.

Don't run Norton products. Just don't. Seriously, delete them.

You don't need to defragment your hard drive any more, OSX does that as
needed as it goes. OSX has built in routines for keeping itself fairly
well tuned, so most of what utilities like Norton's do is superfluous.
You might consider getting a copy of Disk Warrior -- which might be
useful for the current situation -- but aside from that, most of the
third party utilities aren't all that helpful, and some of them actually
make things worse. As you're seeing for yourself now.

> I've tried zapping, or resetting the PRAM, and rebuilding the
> desktop; still no success.

Right, because these OS9-era troubleshooting steps generally have no
bearing at all over what's going on with OSX. There is almost nothing
that zapping the PRAM will fix any more, and there is absolutely nothing
that rebuilding the desktop will fix any more. No longer applicable.
 
> And now, when I try to start up this machine into OS 10.3.9, I'm faced
> with:
>
> /etc/master.passwd: Not a directory
> /etc/master.passwd: Not a directory
> -sh:/etc/profile: Not a directory
> -sh-2.05b#

My hunch is that Norton hoarked your hard drive, and moved or deleted
files critical to booting OSX. You might be able to run

    fsck -fy

to try to check for & repair hard drive filesystem errors, but my guess
is that at best this will tell you that the filesystem is healthy (but
things are still missing, requiring a Panther reinstall), or worse that
the filesytem is damaged (and with it maybe your hard drive). Either
way, your best next course of action might end up being a Panther
reinstall, but if you haven't already, I'd attempt a backup before going
any further, as the system is already unstable & could get worse.

> In the past, when faced with this situation of not being able to get
> into OS 10.3.9, I've simply resorted to reinstalling OS 10.3.
>
> I'm hoping, that with some simple guidance, I can hopefully avoid this
> long and involved process, and in turn, simply get this machine up and
> running as it once was, in OS 10.3.9?

It may be possible to avoid a reinstall, but we don't have enough info
to walk through that path yet.

An archive & install of OSX really isn't that bad, provided you have
enough free disk space for it (roughly 5gb free in your case). Just boot
off the CD, select "archive & install", and set it running; within half
an hour or so, you should be back up to speed, if the hardware is OK.


--
Chris Devers