Ok here is what is going on...my daughter has an ibook and last week it was working absolutley perfectly. When she was done using it she closed it,and later on when she opened it back up to chat with her friends it went to the 'lovely' Darwin/BSD screen. She restarted it,and it does try to load,but then goes right back to Darwin.We are fairly new to the MAC world and have no idea what to do.
It prompts her to login and then it says: welcome to Darwin! Then that's pretty much it, sometimes it will go to a blue screen with the little 'gear-looking' wheel turning,like it is loading,but then it just sits there. I am decent with using command prompts on Windows on my pc,but totally in the dark,as far as this (MAC) goes. Are there any command prompts that can be typed in while in the Darwin mode that may allow us to do anything to try and fix this? I appreciate any help/ideas that can be offered/tried. I am just at my wits end with this one. Thank you for taking the time to read this. Below is what her system is:
Apple iBook G3. It has the following specifications:
600 MHz processor
256 MB RAM
20 GB hard drive
CD-ROM optical drive -- does not have DVD player
AirPort Wireless Card
Runs Mac OS X 10.3.9 -- Panther
12" screen
Two USB ports, firewire, ethernet, internal modem, earphone jack, built-in microphone
for audio IM chatting with iChat
Includes Microsoft Office, Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, with iChat, iTunes, iMovie,
iPhoto, Safari and Quicktime installed.
P.S. she was not running any updates or anything when this happened.
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. Guess I need to purchase those (we bought the ibook used). I have researched and researched about this issue. I have seen several things stating make sure you install the correct version of the OS X operating system...how do I know which ones to purchase? I have looked on ebay,and some other websites and there are several but now I am leary about which ones we need?
Well, it has taken me awhile,but through words of wisdom (thanks joeprogrammer!!!) my daughter's MAC is back! I was able to purchase the Panther install disks through ebay (had to pay a little more than I expected-people must really really be wanting panther 10.3) and we installed them-to our total surprise
all of her personal stuff was still on there! We just had to upgrade a few of her programs. We only had to use two of the three disks that were included in the panther 10.3. Any ideas what is on that third disk? Just curious
Making sure we didn't maybe need to go ahead and run it. Also, in one of the answers I got on here,it said something about creating a 'backup' user account...how do you do this? Apparently,we must have had a backup for all of her things to still be on there from before,right? I don't know...
Unsolved 
