[margvt]

I have an intel iMac that was abruptly shut down by accident yesterday (a power bar was turned off)., It was the end of the work day and it was doing some last minute processing in InDesign and Photoshop. Now, it won't boot and I cannot get it to boot from a CD either -- I've tried disk warrior, Apple Hardware Test, and Tech Tool. All it does is give a good start-up chime, then I get a good apple icon, then it says starting up and the horizontal bar fills the sccreen (but quickly, too quickly, I think), then it fills the monitor with the desktop screen and hangs. Eventually, I get a spotlight icon in the upper RH corner that, when I mouse over, gives me a spinning rainbow wheel.
The same thing happens whether I try to boot from a cd or from the hd.
I am about to try connecting to it via target mode from my powermac and see if I can learn anything, but would LOVE some insights.
It's running 10.4.8 or maybe it was upgraded to 10.4.10 - not sure. At any rate, it ain't running anything right now. Lots of RAM, lots of hd space, because we keep everything on a server.
thanks for any/all help.
Margaret

[Damien]

Description sounds very familiar to what happens when your profile has damaged or corrupted font cache files.
Target-disk-mode boot the computer and delete the fonts caches in /Library/Caches/com.Apple.ATS
Some people just delete the entire folder and reboot. Alternatively, you could delete just the font caches for the profile (almost always 501) and reboot. The font caches will be rebuilt at next login or application launch.

[albloom]

Margaret, try a "safe boot" (hold down the shift key).
If that doesn't do it, boot into single-user mode (splat-S
or command-S on startup). This gets you into the bowels
of Unix, but DON'T PANIC.
At the cmmand prompt type /sbin/fsck -fy and press
Return.
You might benefit from doing this twice.
When the Mac is happy type reboot and press return.
Once you survive that ordeal and can start up again, get
Applejack (versiontracker.com) and intall it. The next time
you need some repair work, startup in single-user mode
again, but this time follow the prompt and type applejack
to get an MS/DOS-reminiscent menu that'll automatically do
the heavy lifting without a lot of typing.
And you really should install Tech Tool Pro's eDrive. An "option"
boot will gain access to that partition (which should boot fine).

[Damien]

Except that if the problem is corrupted font cache files (the main symptom being the desktop hanging with the Spotlight icon by itself, no Dock, no Finder; which I've seen many dozens of times), running fsck at startup won't fix that.
Yes, it's a good troubleshooting tool, but it doesn't match the symptoms of the problem as described. What you're suggesting is that this person pound his nails with a screwdriver instead of a hammer.