eMac Running Panther Hangs on "Waiting for Apple File Services"

June 22, 2004 10:43 AM

Mac OS X:
I have an Emac in the office, running OS X 10.3, it boots, gets to the OS X loading screen, then hangs on "Waiting for Apple File Services", I'm perplexed, offering real gifts for a solution that works... More Inside...

So i've tried the suggestions, here and reset the P-RAM and logged into single user mode
and did all the things that were suggested here, including multiple FSCK's. Nothing working at all. It's an Emac so I can't get the CD drive open to boot from disk and reinstall w/o some fork work, which I don't want to do. If you can help me out I'll send you a gift, a book, a cookie, donate to charity in your name, give a homeless person a ten spot or just love your forever.

posted by Divine_Wino to computers & internet (5 comments total)

BTW, there is "chatter" on the apple support forums about this problem, but no conclusive fix. I'll take it in if I have to but I would druther fix it here.
posted by Divine_Wino at 10:53 AM on June 22, 2004

I could have sworn that it's possible to pull the white CD door open by hand and then use a paperclip to poke a button inside to pop the drive open on an eMac. But I could be misremembering.

What about holding down the mouse button? That's supposed to pop the CD drive open during boot.
posted by bcwinters at 11:04 AM on June 22, 2004

That is a good point. I will try either as a last sad resort to just having the damn thing boot and work.
posted by Divine_Wino at 11:10 AM on June 22, 2004

I could have sworn that it's possible to pull the white CD door open by hand and then use a paperclip to poke a button inside to pop the drive open on an eMac.

Yup, still works.
posted by anathema at 12:26 PM on June 22, 2004

Before you reinstall: I used to have this problem; I never determined exactly what was causing it, but was able to work around it by booting the machine with the ethernet cable disconnected. Once it was fully booted up, I could just plug the cable back in and everything would work fine. A bit of a pain, but acceptable since I rarely needed to shut the machine down.

(I'm pretty sure it had something to do with the network router I was using at the time, since the problem solved itself when I switched to Airport.)

(Also, this may be too obvious, but have you tried disabling all the services in the Sharing prefs panel, to see if that helps?)
posted by ook at 1:04 PM on June 22, 2004