Upgrade to 10.4.10 crashes - now no startup?

Question

So I did the auto upgrade and installed a bunch of stuff. When it tried the OSX upgrade it froze my computer after installation during the setup dialog box. It beachballed for at least 5 hours as I went out of the house for the afternoon while it was working.
When I got home the beachball was still spinning and the computer was unresponsive. I forced quit by holding down the power button. Once the hard drive stopped spinning i started it up again.
I got the white screen with the flat grey apple logo and the spinning circle of lines, then I got the blue screen with the silver Apple logo and the Mac OSX where the blue bar starts loading. That is when the hard drive stopped making noise and the blue bar did not fill in at all.
My screen is stuck right there. Am I screwed? Am I now missing the key components to the software to get my computer to start up since it crashed?
How do I fix this. Is my hard drive toast?
Thanks.

Answer 1

More the likely you originally had a problem before you did the upgrade that you were not aware of in your user account. the most important thing that you must remember is that before you do any installations or upgrades it is a good thing to repair your permissions. to do that go to applications/utilities/disk utilities, click on your hard drive and click repair permissions.
Now with the problem that you are having, seeing that you are getting as far as you are in the boot, it seems to say that your operating system is ok, but there is something wrong with your user account, so try this. Get your instalation disk one and put it in the computer and shut the computer down. after the computer is all the way shut down hold the C key and restart the computer. keep holding the C down until you get to the grey screen with the Apple logo and the spinning gear.
Once you see these you can release the C key, now for a quick note. If you have a wireless mouse it is going to try to resync it. you will see a pic of the mouse on the screen. take the batteries out of the mouse at this time and then just put them back in. in a few seconds it will let you click the arrow on the bottom right of the screen so that you can proceed.
The next screen that you are going to see is choose a language. after you hit continue, on the next screen look up for your tool bar to come up with the blue apple. In the toolbar select utilites and then disk utilites
select macintosh hd (or whatever you have your harddrive named) it will be right under the size of your hard drive. For example 143Gb. After you select it click on repair disk permissions and let it run. Once that is finished and since you are here, select the size of the hard drive and press repair disk, not permissions, just repair disk. Once it is finished close the window, and click on installer by the blue apple and select quit installer, and restart.
If you are able to login at this point go into the system preferences in the blue apple menu, and select accounts. in the top center select login item, and select all and minus them out. do this because if you are having a problem with a certain program, and it is in the login part, the computer will not let you start up.
If after disk permissions you still can not login, try holding the shift key when you here the startup chime and login to safe boot, once in there disable your startup items and try rebooting, one of these should solve your problem