OS X :: Crotchety Login Screen Preventing From Booting To External Drive
Jul 29, 2010
This week I discovered that the hard drive on my white Core 2 Duo macbook is failing. It's of course out of warranty. I have superduper and am in the process of getting things ready to swap out the drive for a new one. Before going ahead with the new install, however, I wanted to test out the bootability of my superduper backup. I held option while restarting and chose to boot from the backup icon. The OSX tiger splash screen appeared and slowly booted up but then a login window appears asking for a name and a password. I assumed it was asking for my administrator name and password.
Therefore I entered that information. However, after entering the information and clicking on the login button the window shook back and forth and shook off my password as if to say "No. No!" I tried entering the admin information again and again. I tried the short name. I tried to reset my user information. Nothing worked. So, I tried to redo my backup thinking that there might be some issues on that side of things. But now my backup isn't complete. It's lagging at about 14 gigs shy of the full copy. I want to get this machine back to working order but am running stuck.
When I turned my iMac on this morning (iMac G5 PPC 10.5.8) it went through all of the "normal" steps (gong, grey screen, apple logo, progress wheel, blue screen) and stopped at the blue screen. Thinking it was just a fluke, I shut the machine down and restarted, only to have it stop at the blue screen again.
After disconnecting everything going into the iMac except the keyboard and mouse, I attempted to boot into safe mode but it stopped at the blue screen again. I tried single user mode too but I didn't get any further than the blue screen.
Next, I flashed the PRAM (big gong, single quieter gong) and afterwards it came to the blue screen.
I reattached my external drive and selected to boot from a 2-day old backup. Using the backup I was able to log into both my regular account and my "test" account (without login items).
Am using a Late 2011 MacBook Pro with 480GB SSD. Using Yosemite. When I turn on the power it boots but before and at the login prompt it dims horribly but not all the time. Is there anything I can do to stop this from happening?
My step dad is showing some interest in my Mac and wants to give it a go. I was thinking of installing OS X on an external drive and booting directly into it from his PC. Is that possible?
I have a mac pro running Leopard with Time Machine backup on an external 500GB FREECOM drive. My issue is that I cannot boot my mac while the drive is connect, because it seems it tries to boot from the external drive and it starts displaying a flashing folder with a question mark in it. So everytime I need to fire up my machine, I need to disconnect the external drive > boot > connect the external drive.
My MacBook's hard drive recently took a turn for the worst. I can't boot up from my external with the drive still installed. If I take my internal hard drive out can I then boot up my mac from my external?
I have a Black Macbook with 2GB ram, 250GB HDD, 2.4GHz Processor and have been trying to boot off of my 320GB firewire External HDD but it has so far been unsuccessful. I have the external formatted as GUID Partition Table, and have the four system disk folders on the drive (Applications, Library, System, Users) which I copied from a time machine backup. I have tried booting the MB while holding down the option key and the external HDD appears as a drive available for booting on. But when I select the external HDD a cross with a circle around it appears and it boots off the internal HDD instead of the external HDD.
I'm planning on getting a SSD to put in my Mac Mini within the next month or two, but there are a few questions I have about it. I'll still have the 160 GB HDD that's in the Mini currently, and I'll buy an enclosure for it. But what I want to do, as to save space on the SSD (since I'll be buying 80 GB probably) is boot Windows 7 off the 160 GB. Is this possible?
Environment clones ( made by Leopard compatible SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner) to two separate LaCie Firewire drives will not boot from those drives Leopard (10.5.6) running on an old 14" iBook G4 1.1 GHZ. Both SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner declared the clones bootable, and they are selectable as Startup drives. All three drives (internal included) are partitioned using Apple Partition Map and OSX Extended Journaled. Has anyone met and solved this problem? BTW - I did read somewhere that Leopard is designed to use the GUID partition scheme; but this is of no use with a PPC Mac. Could this be the source of the problem?
Specifically, I'm considering a freelance design gig for which the client supplies an external firewire drive with a) a bootable system, b) a more recent version of the Adobe Suite than I own (necessary - his files are all in the more recent version), c) all of the project files, and d) Suitcase and all of the tons of different fonts required. The gig is uninspiring - a coupon catalog - but each of his many clients gets to supply either their own print-ready PDF or copy/photos/fonts for him/me to layout...the result being there's a ton of fonts.
So in other words, it's a preconfigured system to simplify different people working on the same files. Not at the same time, obviously, but the idea being that a new person can simply boot up from this drive and go right to work. I've scanned the drive with VirusBarrier and found nothing wrong with it. And I don't see any suspicious programs in the Applications folder. And I don't have any reason to suspect that that this guy would do anything underhanded...but I'm understandably (I think) nervous. Is there a way to protect my internal drive/files when I boot from an external drive? It would give me peace of mind if there were steps I could take that would allow me to boot from his drive without worrying about the possibility that there MIGHT be a program or script or something that might muck about with my computer.
My parents bought a new iMac and have finally made the switch. There's one program on their old hard drive that they need to use. I've installed Windows XP on the new iMac, put the old pc hard disk in a USB2 enclosure and would love to use that to boot off of. The problem is that the iMac doesn't consider that as an option when booting.
The other issue is that if the power goes off and the computer reboots, the default seems to be for the Windows partition and the Mac OSX.
One of my external hard drives simply refuses to eject/un-mount, and I've done everything I can think of to terminate any processes and/or applications that may be using the drive and preventing it from being ejected properly, but I haven't had any success. Is there some Mac-Jedi way of going about isolating what might be preventing this drive from ejecting properly? I've scoured the activity monitor but can't figure out what might be preventing the drive from ejecting?
I just set up an old G4 Mac Mini with a 1.5 GHz PPC chip and 64 MB VRAM as an HTPC with the intent to use it to watch Hulu and ABC.com and other sites where you can stream TV shows online. However, Hulu is very very choppy. The audio's fine but the video is pretty disappointing. In full screen it's really just a series of still pictures. I know Flash on the mini is supposed to not be that great, but is there anything I can do?
Is there any way to change the video settings of the g4 or of the TV to improve the streaming video playback? I'm playing it on a 40" Samsung LCD connected via DVI--> HDMI.
I'm booting off an external firewire drive through Firewire 400 and my concern is that perhaps this is the problem - the slowdown is not coming from the processor or the VRAM but rather from the Firewire. Can anyone with a similar setup let me know if this works for them. Is there anyway to speed up the I/O between the G4 and the Firewire drive? it's a LaCie 250GB D2 Hard Drive Extreme with Triple Interface.
According to the Activity Monitor, Safari's using 72% of the CPU to play from Hulu. According to Hulu's support page, the Mac Mini meets the system requirements. I'm just trying to watch the SD videos, not the HD. I have Flash 10 and Safari 3.1.2.
So here is my bright idea. I still may want to have Windows on my iMac for work projects *sigh* I think I came up with a solution, I rather not partition my iMac (when I buy it) 1TB drive for Windows. Don't want Windows on my main disk - I need the storage for Mac things, personal stuff etc. Is it possible to boot from a Firewire connected external HDD to run Windows?
Would like to disable my external drive from automounting every time a user logs in. Added an /etc/fstab, but still automounts on login. I would like this drive to mount only when I choose to mount it.
I am currently using an external drive for my user storage. Right now I log in with a separate User account to mount the drive, log off, and then log in with my user. I am trying to remove the extra steps so I can boot my Mac and log right in. I have not found any method that pertains specifically to Mavericks, and all of the methods I have tried for older OS versions do not seem to work properly.
Info: MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013), OS X Mavericks (10.9.5)
I work in a cross platform environment (windows/mac) where we typically save common files to a shared network drive. I've found when I save a file directly from excel (as opposed to saving it locally, then copying it over) it created an invisible ._filename file in the same directory. I know it's a property/resource file for the file that I just created, but it's a little confusing for some windows users and just clutters up the share directory. Is there any way to prevent the creation of the ._filename file while still saving directly from excel?
(I'd prefer not to save locally, then move to network drive - it's cleaner for me if I can just save directly) So far, I've found that this only happens with MS Office. I've opened a sql file in textwrangler and komodo, edited it, and saved it to the network and no invisible files are created.
NOTE: this is different the the fix that apple had published regarding not creating DS_Store files - that refers to copying files from the finder to a network drive and I don't have any problems with that.
Ok so today my 27" iMac (10.6.2) was acting kind of weird. In safari and chrome webpages would spontaniously crash for no reason (on my macbook, the same webpages were fine). So, to try and fix this issue, I decided to restart my imac. After all the applications quit, I was left with a blank screen with my wallpaper. It stayed like this for several minutes, so I decided to just hold the power button to force the imac to turn off. When I turned it back on, my user name was not displayed in the login window. All there was for accounts was "other" and a network symbol. When I click other and entered my user name and password, it did not work. I am sure I was using the correct password and username. I also tried: username: root, but that also did not work. So i rebooted again and the same "other" still was there without my real account. So i booted into my Mac OS X install dvd and I repaired the disk and all the permissions (there were a lot of things to repair). I thought that this would solve the problem, but it did not.
I have an external hard drive which I have successfully installed Windows XP SP3 onto. It was a long and painful process but I finally was able to get a modified XP install disc ready and from a Dell PC running Windows was able to install onto the external hard drive and I'm able to boot from it and everything. I did this on a PC because I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to boot correctly from an external drive in Mac.
Anyway, the hardest part is in the past and now my only problem is how to boot this external hard drive from my macbook, which is primarily what I want to use it on. I currently have a Macbook with three operating systems on it: Mac OS 10.5.8, Ubuntu Linux, and Windows XP SP3. I use rEFIt to boot into these operating systems. I tried using rEFIt to boot into XP on the external hard drive but it just gives me the legacy error messages saying that it couldn't load and noting the booting legacy os is not well supported by mac.
Hi! Im new to the forums but i really need help with something and i was hoping someone here could help me out. So I just installed Tech Tool Deluxe onto my macbook and then shut it down later. I went back to use it again and when i turned it on a login screen appeared asking me to put in my password. I did that and the screen turned blue (looking like it was loading) and then went back to the login screen. Every time i put in my password it just takes me back to the login screen. I have had my mac for a while and i dont want my hardrive to get wiped out so what do i do? Thank you for looking
how to make a clone of my 10.5 current Drive (using superduper) and then booting from the external and upgrading (the external) to 10.6. the logic being that I could run 10.6 and my mac from my External Drive and then revert back to 10.5 when I boot as normal...
I bought a Guardian MAXimus hard drive and it seemed to be working fine for the past few weeks. Now all of sudden when starting my Imac 27 I7 the grey screen takes a long time then it get stuck on the blue screen and stays like that. Some times after being on the blue screen it will goto the main page but it takes 3-5 min if it does. When it gets stuck, if I unplug the firewire from the back of the computer from the hard drive it boots up. Any thoughts, their tech support wants me to send the unit back with out doing any testing at home to see what the problem is, seems like a pain in the butt.
A little while ago I build my own SATA drive using an enclosure from Addonics, and two 750GB Seagate drives. I had it connected with eSata to my Mac Book Pro 2.0 Core Duo, and using RAID 1 mirroring. The eSata card is a Wiebetech Express 34 card. Everything had been working fine and dandy, until one day I plugged the enclosure in, and I suddenly got the grey screen of death telling me to shut down my computer. After restarting, I tried plugging the drives in again, only to get the same thing. So after all manner of switching cables, eSata cards, and reinstalling drivers, I still had the same result. So I tried something else - I took out one of the Seagate drives and threw it in a Firewire 400 single enclosure made by Acomdata. After turning that drive on, I still got the same error message. I tried the other mirrored drive, and again, the same grey screen of death. So at this point I wondering if both my drives, with the exact same data on them, are completely corrupt. Neither one of them is making that terrible clicking sound that seems to happen to dying drives. But I can't fathom what happened to both drives that would cause such an error. I created a mirrored setup for the exact reason that if one drive failed, surely I would have the other one left. Can anyone shed some light on this situation? I am totally prepared to pay for data recovery on these drives, but it would really help to know what I'm dealing with here.
Will the external display work while I boot from the Leopard DVD? My MacBook Pro screen is broken and I want to make an .img file of my HD before I install the new LCD.
My Intel MacBook is in the shop, and I swapped out my hard drive before I sent it in and put it in a USB enclosure. I was able to boot my friend's MacBook Pro from the drive, but my G4 Mac Mini is not seeing it as an option (upon startup or otherwise). I can read files from it, but I really need to boot from the drive for some other things (cookies, passwords, and especially the ability to sync my iPod touch).
I am trying to do a clean install of OSX 10.5 on my old powerbook G4 15". I am using a 10.5 image file on my external. I partitioned the external using GUID, and restored the image file onto the external. (this method works when installing on intel macs). Unfortunately, I cannot boot 10.5 using this method on my powerbook. Is it because i am using a firewire 800 cable? Should I be booting it using a firewire 400? I know that PPC macs cannot boot using usb, so i am stumped.
before I went to bed, I was playing the Sims 2, when my iBook G4 crashed. Our power cord can be a bit dodgy, so sometimes that happens. I didn't really think about it much, just closed the laptop and went to sleep.Last Monday morning, I opened it and pressed the power button. It began turning on, and got as far as the grey screen with the apple and the spinning circle. And then it just froze. The circle stopped turning.
I freaked out a bit, and restarted it a bunch of times, each time with the same result. (One time it stopped spinning, and then told me a restart was required. Huh. The rest of the times the exact same thing happened though.) I even tried unplugging and removing the battery, but it made no difference. So eventually I just shut it and decided to try again later.Last Tuesday I opened it and pressed the power button without much hope, and again the apple and circle came up just fine, then stopped, but then a bunch of words and numbers popped up.I'm a complete computer noob, but they don't look good to me... or are they good?
Kernel version: Darwin Kernel Version 7.9.0: Wed Mar 30 20:11:17 PST 2005; root:xnu/xnu-517.12.7.obj~1/REEASE_PPC
I upgraded the ram to 4gb crucial on my 24" intel imac (early 2008). Now it freezes at apple screen, but only if my external WD My Book hard drive is plugged in via firewire. If I unplug it from the firewire port.
