Startup Leads to Darwin/BSD Login Screen

Question

After scouring this discussion forum for solutions to my problem, I've come up with multiple partial answers, but nothing that really fixes my system. I was working in Photoshop (CS2) yesterday when the program quit and refused to open again. So I shut it down and rebooted the machine. The gray screen with the Apple and the progress bar came up for about 10 minutes, then switched to a black console Darwin/BSD login screen. Unfortunately, I don't know my login, because my machine is set to auto-login.
I found this old post:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=1545778&#1545778
Which was VERY helpful. I followed Michael Conniff's directions carefully, checking the log and running 'fsck'. But the error messages I'm seeing are different than the ones listed in that post.
I tried restoring the NetInfo database, as per the previous post, but when I rebooted, I still got stuck at the gray screen with the Apple logo.
Please help!
PowerPC Mac Mini G4 1.2Ghz   Mac OS X (10.3.9)   512MB RAM . 80GB HD . AirPort . Wired Keyboard / Mouse

Answer 1

Scott
Welcome to Apple Discussions!!
Login authorization failed (60005)!
AuthorizationRef doesn't have a usernameYou really should start a new Topic instead of tagging on to an old one, since frogface's problem has moved on from his original post.
However, given the current behaviour of the forums I will reply here if I can, since there's no guarantee of me seeing a new topic
Standard post follows:
Where the system log shows "AuthorizationRef doesn't have a username" followed by "exiting to console", the NetInfo database is corrupt. so we will need to give you a new one. This will involve re-creating the user accounts (don't worry, this doesn't take too long) but the order in which they are created matters. I recommend you print this out in a largish mono-spaced font so you don't miss any spaces (or add extra ones). Note that case is important.
Start up in Single User Mode (see Mac OS X: How to Start up in Single-User or Verbose Mode for details) and type carefully:
/sbin/fsck -fyRepeat the above until it says your disk is OK. Then:
/sbin/mount -uw /
cd /var/db/netinfo
mv -f local.nidb/ local.nidb.bad
rm -f /var/db/.AppleSetupDone
ls -ln /UsersThis last command will give you one line for each user, plus one for the "Shared" directory, which doesn't interest us. Each user will have a line like one of these:
<pre>drwxr-xr-x 29 501 501 986 Jan 17 18:38 michaelc
drwxr-xr-x 14 520 20 476 Sep 10 2004 jdoe</pre>The second numeric field (501, 520) is the user ID (UID) and you need to list the uids against the shortname s given in the final column. Make sure you get the name right for UID 501! Then continue with
rebootWhen you restart, you should get the Setup Assistant, just as if it was a new machine. You will be prompted for all of your user information. Be careful to use the same short name as previously for user 501.
If there are any further users, these can be added, in the order of their UIDs, i.e. 502, 503 …, using System Preferences > Accounts. Again, be careful to use the same shortname. If there are any gaps in the UID sequence 501, 502, … you will need to create dummy users to fill them. These can later be deleted.
Post back if there's anything you have difficulty with …