[iBook] endless spinning cursor

[Larry Kollar]

On Tuesday, March 8, 2005, at 09:10 PM, R. Hefner wrote:

> Lately my iBook has been experiencing the endless spinning cursor 
> problem and the only thing I can do to get it to stop is push the off 
> button for a few secs and then reboot.

Time to do maintenance.

As you boot the computer, hold down Cmd-S until you see white text 
scrolling on a black screen. After a couple of minutes, the text should 
end with a line with "#" at the end. That's the root prompt. Type   
fsck   (File System ChecK) and press Return. It will grind for a few 
minutes. If it ends up with the message, "FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED" do 
it again. You should after one or two of those, get a message "The disk 
'Macintosh HD' appears to be OK." When you see that message, press 
Ctrl-D (control-D) to get to regular OSX mode.

Log in as usual, and start Disk Utility (Applications -> Utilities). 
Click your hard drive along the left, click the "First Aid" tab at the 
top, then click "Repair Permissions" at the bottom. Wait for it to 
finish. You'll see some weird messages in the window, but that's normal.

Finally, start Terminal (Applications -> Utilities). Type   sudo 
update_prebinding -root  /  -force   and press Return. It will ask for 
a password; type your login password (you have to be an admin user to 
do this, by the way). This will also run a few minutes, and will scroll 
some errors (can't prebind this file or that) which don't matter.

If you still have problems, let us know.
--
Larry Kollar    k  o  l  l  a  r  @  a  l  l  t  e  l  .  n  e  t
"The hardest part of all this is the part that requires thinking."
-- Paul Tyson, on xml-doc