Broken shutdown procedure

[sadiekiller]

ok, so i found out yesterday that my dad's G4 no longer shuts down like it is supposed to. When told to shut down, it starts the rutine, but then gives an error that it need to be restarted (that grey box of hate). so you hold the power button for a good 10 seconds and it shuts off. then when you start it up, it tells you that Mac OS X crashed unexpectedly. It also gives no chime on start up, which is normally a signal that everythign is fine. He has the entire system imaged to another, external hard drive, but im not sure when he last imaged it, so the image might hold the problem as well. I'm guessing that it is a bad upgrade to 10.4.7, which he just recently did. He uses his powerbook more than the G4, so its not crucial, and he might be getting a new iMac anyway, but he wants to use it as a print server, so he doent have wires all over the desk.

 

Would this problem be a firmware error, or an OS X problem? Would he just need to repair part of the system, or reinstall the entire OS? Normally I would just go at it by myself, but he has stuff he would rather not be destroyed.

[Timyang]

I'm not an expert here, so I say it could be anything. It's not that hard to reinstall OS X, use archive and install so you won't lose any user data and still get a fresh install.

[sadiekiller]

hmm, i never knew they had that option. ill check that out tomorrow.

[Caslon]

Run disk permissions repair from disk utilities first before you re-install.

[sadiekiller]

oo, i forgot about that, but it worked. the computer now shutsdown normally. When i finished repairing disk permessions, i figured it owudl be a good idea to verify the disk as well, no harm can be done. when i verify it, it tells me there is an illegal name in teh cataloge, and that the verification proscess had an error on exit and i should repair my disk. The repair disk button is still greyed out however. i think ill just image it and reformat the disk.