System hangs after loginwindow.app has been started

[Stony]

You all are now my last hope..

 

How the story has begun: One day ago I decided to make a trip with my PC to a friend. I put in my car, drove 1,5 hours to him. After I plugged in mouse, keyboard etc., I started it. And what happend? First I saw a usual the Bootscreen with the white Apple logo and the circling start underneeth. Normally the Loginwindows appears after it, but than I saw the grey windows which says "You have to restart your computer blablabla..".

 

"Ok, just restart your machine and all will be fine.." I thought. Nothing was fine. This error appeard now every time, booting with -x, -v, -F didn't help. This ours ago while I was at Home I shut down the computer just normal, didn't installed any drivers, programs. Nothing, everthig was just fine.

 

I opened the case to see if some hardware is damaged. Nothing. I've running Windows (dualboot) on the same machine: Windows works fine, no erros, nothing.

 

Ok, maybe some important software of my OS X has been damages (don't know how this could happen) cleared the mac partition and installed Mac again. "Ahhh" I thought and saw the Mac Desktop. I started to install some drivers again (which all had worked before 100%) and restarted the system. After this the same error appeared.

 

I don't know what I can do, lots of people in IRC tried to help me, but nothing worked.

 

Please, help me out of this situation!

[gimpyviper]

You all are now my last hope..

 

How the story has begun: One day ago I decided to make a trip with my PC to a friend. I put in my car, drove 1,5 hours to him. After I plugged in mouse, keyboard etc., I started it. And what happend? First I saw a usual the Bootscreen with the white Apple logo and the circling start underneeth. Normally the Loginwindows appears after it, but than I saw the grey windows which says "You have to restart your computer blablabla..".

 

"Ok, just restart your machine and all will be fine.." I thought. Nothing was fine. This error appeard now every time, booting with -x, -v, -F didn't help. This ours ago while I was at Home I shut down the computer just normal, didn't installed any drivers, programs. Nothing, everthig was just fine.

 

I opened the case to see if some hardware is damaged. Nothing. I've running Windows (dualboot) on the same machine: Windows works fine, no erros, nothing.

 

Ok, maybe some important software of my OS X has been damages (don't know how this could happen) cleared the mac partition and installed Mac again. "Ahhh" I thought and saw the Mac Desktop. I started to install some drivers again (which all had worked before 100%) and restarted the system. After this the same error appeared.

 

I don't know what I can do, lots of people in IRC tried to help me, but nothing worked.

 

Please, help me out of this situation!

 

I'm sure someone has suggested it before, but in case they didn't did you reinstall the drivers one at a time to determine which one was the culprit?

 

If not, do a full blown reformat, reinstall just the base system and kernel then install the driver you most likely think is the problem. (99% of the time it's video related) If you boot ok after installing the driver move on to the next most likely candidate. To be totally sure, I would even go as far (and Ive done this before) to do a clean install after that and install just the system then the determined culprit device driver.

 

Once you know what the problem driver is try looking for a newer version or even replacing the part with something suitable.

 

Oh and just because hardware works in Windows doesn't mean anything. I spent a week trying to get OS X to install on my dual opteron rig, could never get past file copy part during installation. No matter what DVD I used. Turned out my DVD-RW drive was hosed. Now mind you it worked perfectly fine under Windows, heck it even burned the OSX86 install DVDs. But would not work to install OSX86, replaced the drive everything ran like a champ.

 

Granted I highly doubt a DVD drive is the source of your problem but just to show you that just because hardware works in windows doesn't necessarily mean its ok.

 

Oh and what happens, what does it display exactly when you boot in verbose mode (-v) does it just hang after saying loading loginwindow.app ?

[Stony]

You would't believe it but..

 

I took my PC back to my home, plugged in my own screen and Mac booted up as usual. Don't know why but it seems Mac did't "like" the foreign screen and "decided" not to start.. its all very strange and I'm a bit angry because I cleared my partition and have now to install all again.

 

Anyway, thanks for your detailed help.

[Matthew Jason]

You could check what's the error message. System don't just hang like that. Also, try to boot using the installation DVD and perform a permission repair. :0

 

Matthew

[Stony]

There was no errors message. Seriosly. Verbose mode said at least, Loginwindow.app ist started and then hang. No error, nothing. Very strange.

[gimpyviper]

You would't believe it but..

 

I took my PC back to my home, plugged in my own screen and Mac booted up as usual. Don't know why but it seems Mac did't "like" the foreign screen and "decided" not to start.. its all very strange and I'm a bit angry because I cleared my partition and have now to install all again.

 

Anyway, thanks for your detailed help.

 

Actually I would believe it...

 

What kind of screen do you have at home vs where you were at?

 

On my Hackintosh at home, if I don't have both monitor ports plugged in it freezes at loading loginwindow.app

 

So it could very well be you're experiencing the same symptoms.

 

If I had to guess, your monitor at home is using VGA and your friend is DVI?

[Stony]

The have VGA plugs both. My screen is a Videoseven one, my friends is "Medion" or something. I things my friends one is a bit old and maybe Mac did't like the old one.