[MarkS]

Hi guys, I know this is ment to be the chill-out section of the forum, but I couldn't see anywhere else to put this, so feel free to move if you feel the need.

I booted the PC and mac this morning as usual (apart from not having the mac on in a few days), and went to make the morning coffee, but when I came back in to the room the mac was shut down, black screen, so, thinking I hadn't pressed the button I pressed it, it made the boot sound and then showed the loading/booting icon, after a minute or so I heard the drive/fans kick in then it all shut down again itself.

I will be starting on work in the next day or so on a job, and I have no mac to work on

I recently re-installed OSX10.5, and a few other programs on it (CS3, quark, office etc) and had been using it for a few days with no problems, until this morning.

if there are any mac guru's in here, I would really appreciate some pointers!

[Boss Hog]

Sorry to hear you are having hassles, I don't have any tips really as I use a PC, do macs have an option to boot in safe-mode or is that just PC's?

You may find a quicker solution to this here...

Mac Forums | Apple, iPod, iPhone Discussions

[MarkS]

Cheers for the link, I have registered and posted a request, no reply as yet, but hope to get some response soon.

[MarkS]

The Mac is now up and runing again, I had to scrub all the music of the iPod Photo, duplicate the original disk onto the ipod, go buy a firewire cable for it, and using Apple + S boot to the option for boot drive, choosing the installation on the firewired ipod.
Once everything installed OK, I run several checks in Disk utility to make sure the drive was ok, it has showed nothing wrong, so I have continued and installed all the required programmes back on.

I have also wiped a spare 250gb IDE drive that I have in a USB2 enclosure, and plan to set up a RAID to duplicate any work I save on the Mac's drive - just incase.
So I am on the hunt for a suitable way of setting this up.

[Pixels Ink]

ALWAYS have a backup drive.

Glad you got it up and running again mate

[MarkS]

Cheers PI, however it didn't last...
Once I had the bare minimum on the system I went in search of a few back up and file duplication utilities on the apple site and found Smart Utility 2.0 which tests drives, so I downloaded and ran it... it showed several errors with the HDD, so I have had to open the iMac and take out that drive, and also clear and remove a 500gb drive from my PC to replace it.

So yet again I am in the process of re-installing all my software again.
At least I will have a bit more space on it now, I just hope this one keeps going.
The plan was to use the 500gb drive as a back up drive, so now I have to go looking for another drive to use as a back up, and to replace the drive from my PC.