Boots to blue screen and won't load os10

Question

when i turn on my computer, it boots only to a blue screen and no farther.
there is the "whirly gig" things that goes around on the blue screen, but it wont load the OS ..........any helps is appreciated!

Answer 1

I'm in pretty much the same boat...
I left a classroom eMac running a bunch of updates. When I came back and hit the restart button, it goes through the grey screen with the apple and then stops at the blue screen. Sometimes with a cursor in the upper left corner, sometimes with the little spinning gear, sometimes both, sometimes neither.
When I boot verbose mode, it launches loginwindow, then does 2 lines of network startup, then stops. Which makes sense -- because the blue screen is supposed to be showing loginwindow.
I have already:
-- run fsck when booted into single-user mode. It's clean now, but the first time I did it there were errors that were fixed.
-- run disk utility and repaired permissions. Again, the first time there was repair work to be done, and now it's clean.
-- zapped the pram.
-- tried to boot in safe mode (by hitting the shift key right after the startup tones and holding it down until the blue screen comes up -- which comes up without the loginwindow in safe mode.)
Is there anything else to try before a reinstall?
This is a lab computer, so I'm not sure whether to do an archive/install, or to do a clean install, run migration assistant from another machine, and then fix the machine name. The one time I tried archive/install I ended up with a machine which it's impossible to install print drivers on. (I keep installing the driver over and over, but it never appears on the list of printers in the add printers panel.)
thanks for any help!