Solution found to the Start-up screen blues

[Glen (Planet)]

To all, 
that provided such quick assistance to my call for help regarding my
start-up blues, my thanks. I was quite impressed at the assistance and the
speed to which it came.

Unfortunately, it took a few days to work through some of the suggestions
and then I had to rush off to South East Asia, on another mission.

Anyway, the short of it is that I believe that I have the problem solved.

But let me summarize some of the approaches that I tried, and then explain
what seems to have fixed the problem ( I say seems to have fixed it, as I
have no access to a wireless network to give it a final checkout, but I can
now boot with the airport card in place).
 
Stephen Hart suggested:
> Do you have Use Network Time turned on? That might cause a delay
> because the iBook is looking for the server.
Yes, I've seen this problem before and consequently always have the Network
Time turned off.
 
> There's a setting somewhere, I think, to automatically remount servers
> on startup. Do you have that checked? That could cause the iBook to
> wait until the other servers are available.
I had a little trouble with this one, but I went through he Directory Access
and believe this is the setting you were referring to. There wasn't too much
I could do other then change the server name from Workgroup to Mshome (as it
is called on my wife's PC)
 
> In either case, if the server is not available, the iBook may spend a
> long time trying before giving up and continuing with startup.
This seems to be the case, but what stumps me is that when I wait it out
-overnight- I finally get to a log in screen that doesn't recognize my log
in name or password
 
And, Brian Farley suggested:
  
> You didn't mention the Apple Knowledge Base
Yes sorry I didn't mention using this resource yet it this was one of the
first places I looked.  I went through the procedure they recommended,
including removing the old preferences through the terminal window. But this
didn't help.

> Is the card OK?
Yes, the card is fine. I was able to get everything working in OS 9.

> When does it stall? If you download with Software Update, it can pick
> up downloading from where it stopped. Perhaps your ISP has a time limit.

Good suggestion. I downloaded Download Speeder -and using the time limited
shareware version- that allowed me to get the file over a series of
sessions. So I now have the latest OS 10.2.5 installed
> 
> Have you tried Apple disk utility if the problem is not the card?
Yes I've run this utility repeatedly, hoping to fix any errors.

So, I continued to searching  the net and I came across an obscure reference
warning users of older G3 Macs to be careful to not finish a session of
either terminal or Verbose start-up, with the "exit" command but instead use
the "reboot" command. Apparently doing the former will hang you in a blue
screen. Well, I can't recall ever doing this it seems to be a clue.

So I restarted the iBook in verbose (Command V) and then after it started up
I shut down and remounted the airport card and followed up with a normal
start-up, and there it is. My desktop is there and the airport card is
recognized and apparently functioning.

I'm in the deep woods in respect to understanding what actually happened
here but I'll be sure to report if this is just a short-term reprieve or an
actual solution.

Again, many thanks to all. I'll enjoy sitting back now and reading about
other issues on the list.
Glen
-- 
Glen Swanson
Ethnic Minority Specialist

The Land Titling II Project Preparation

Ministry of Finance, Department of Lands.
Lane Xang Avenue. Vientiane, Lao PDR.

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> 
> Brian
>