Mac OS Boot up problems.

[Aardvarck]

Hi everyone.

This is a problem that my dad's friend is having with his mac. I have little to no experience with Macs.

Here's the problem.

Whenever he boots up his machine, it partially boots and it goes to a blue screen. He can still see the mouse cursor, but I'm not sure if he can move the mouse around.

I know it's not very detailed, but that's all i really know.

Is there a way to do a repair install of the OS like you can with Windows? I'd like to avoid having to reformat, because it's a business computer and he's got a lot of stuff that he'll need to keep.

Also, I'm not sure what version of Mac OS it is, but let's assume that it's OS9 (the one before X i'm guessing :P)

thanks in advance.

[HHunt]

Try holding in shift while it's booting.
(See this (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107393).)

[KaosDG]

What type of mac is it? (iMac, eMac, PowerMac, etc)

You may get more help posting this in the apple section of the forums.

[Aardvarck]

k, it's an eMAC.

i've got it right in front of me.

the OS is OSX.

what it's doing is loading past the screen with the gray apple, and getting to the screen with the blue bar that loads. that goes away, and then the screen is just light blue and i can use the mouse cursor to move around.

there is obviously something fubar in the startup files, so i'm going to try the shift key method and see if that'll help.

[Aardvarck]

ok, when i try to boot into safe mode via the shift key, it gets to the gray screen and then just reboots.

when i hit command-s and then type fsck, i get the following:

/dev/rdisk0s3
**root file system
**Checking HFS Plus Volume
**Checking Extents overflow file
**Checking Catalog File
Invalid Key Length
(4, 343)
**volume checksum failed.

that's even after typing fsck -f and fsck -fy