Hi,

I have just bought my first Mac (1.67Ghz Mini with 1GB RAM) after having PC's for years. It worked well for a few weeks and I was very happy with it but now takes several goes to start. It will get past the white screen with the rotating graphic to a blue screen and then just hang. Usually it takes 2 to 4 re-starts to get through to the login screen and then everything is fine from then on. On my PC I'd suspect a dodgy drive but the lack of symptoms once you get the mini started is a little strange. I am not familiar with OS X's boot sequence so any clues will be appreciated.
Not sure if it was a coincidence but the problems started when I partially installed Boot Camp and then reloaded OS X 10.4.7 from the disks to get back to a clean install.

Thanks for any help.

Richard

Sounds like you sorta messed up the install of OS X. You would be best to do a full install again. All part of the learning curve

boot into verbose mode and see where it freezes
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106388

Could be hardware or software issues. hard to say which one without some more info

Thanks for the 2 suggestions.

I had done a full install to recover from the mishap with Boot Camp and the problems has persisted since then unfortunately. How do you mess it up? It seemed to go perfectly and didn't require much user intervention. Perhaps I'd better have another go just to be sure.

I just tried verbose mode as suggested and I get the black screen with scrolling boot info which all seems to go fine until that screen changes to the blue screen just before login and then it hangs. After the logging to the screen ends sadly. The machine seems to be having trouble detecting the screen type too as it only occasionally gets the screen resolution right at the login screen. Seems too much of a coincidence, an issue with the graphics drivers perhaps?

Finally solved the issue. It was a problem with detecting the display type and resolution. The Mac would freeze when it tried to change the LCD's resolution to it's native one to display the login screen. Changed to an old VDU or switch the cable and problem solved.