One quick question for you nfoav8or and/or Lawless, do you think that the problem of me having to boot into safe boot (safe mode) is due to the graphics card drivers having an issue? Cause to tell you the truth, when I do boot into safe mode, everything seems fine, graphically speaking. If I install iDeneb with the ATI 3870 drivers supplied with the iDeneb install DVD, then I can boot into safe mode, no graphical glitches or anything are present. If I try to boot into normal mode, there aren't any graphical glitches either (as in funny bubbles, or stripes and boxes, etc.) but it just shows that blue screen and two mouse pointers, one which moves and one which doesn't. I did notice one thing. In the darwin load, right before I get to the login screen in safe mode, there is some kind of a long message about the sandbox. It almost looks like a kind of error. I cant read all of it though because it is several lines long and when it shows up, I literally have like 5 seconds to read it before I am taken from verbose mode for boot up to the login screen. Is there any where to find a log of the boot up proccess or the different items that were loded or the different errors? That would be EXTREMELY helpful in trouble shooting this.

Right now I am at work, and I didn't have the time last night to try your solution. Kids come first. So I till try it later tonight. Thanks again for your help and willingness to give it, plus your patience with a n00b.

your graphics issues are caused by what i posted earlier. boot logs are contained within console (well can be viewed from within it)

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Thanks for the quick reply Lawless. So I understand from your previous post that the graphics glitches (bubbles, stipes, boxes, etc) are due to the graphics kext not funtioning properly. And thanks for the great step by step proccess on how to fix it (you to nfoav8or), I will try it once I get home to test it. What I was wondering is if the reason why I cant boot to normal mode is truly due to a graphics kext error. What makes us think that it really is a graphics issue that is not allowing me to boot into normal mode? Cause when I boot into normal mode, no login is visible and yes the mouse pointer is present twice, but there are no typical glitches like when I don't install the ATI 3870 kext during the install process. Does that make sense?

I am just trying to see if there is any proccess of elimination that I can do here at work without being at my computer. Just trying to be efficient.

Oh, one more thing. Thanks for putting up with my annoying questions. What can I say, I am a n00b at this.

Oh, and where in the console can I find those boot logs? Any commands that I need to get to them? Thank again, you have been a HUGE help.. :-)

the reason why safe mode works is it doesnt load the graphics driver it only runs in vesa mode i know this issue with ati cards quite well as i had to fix the installer for the hd3650 to be 10.5.4 compatible in my distro. I had to make sure my installer would over write files that were newer than those being installed. Console is a complete program not shell or cli. It allows you to read all system errors, logs and crash reports. Just look at it and youll get the jist of it. Its in applications/utilities

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safe mode -x can also avoid other potential driver issues.

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Dude, you're awesome!! Thanks very much for your input. I will try your suggestions once I get home. Also, I will check out the console program. Just from the name, I assumed that you were referring to the terminal, but silly me, if you were talking about the terminal, you would have said terminal. Thanks once more!! I will probably thank you like 50 more times before I get everything fixed seeing as I feel like a complete reject when it comes to this stuff (hence the n00b questions ) I will leave you alone for the time being until I get home to try your suggestions. Take care!

Ok guys, Thanks for your help and patience with my stupid questions. I followed your advice nfoav8or and LawlessPPC. I am now in normal mode and it works just fine. There are only a couple small issues: If I don't run -v at the boot prompt then the grey apple logo/screen stays on the screen for an indeffinite time, until I move the mouse then the busy little clock like icon shows up and within a few moments I am on my desktop. I also noticed that during the install of iDeneb right around "about a minute left" the progress bar would stop and all activity would stop unless I constantly moved the mouse, then it would finally finish in about a minute. If I stopped moving the mouse during the install, then the progress bar would stop too. I have also noticed that if I open up a menu (i.e. File, Edit, View, etc.) in normal mode, then the highlighted option in the menu will start to jump between where my cursor is actually at in the menu and the top option, kind of annoying. So I think that it has to do with my mouse for some reason. I will try a different mouse and see what is up with it.

Also, my usb keyboard is not detected in either safe or normal mode if I have it connected via usb. But if I use a usb to ps/2 converter, it works just fine. The board is a logitech board and even has the apple icons on some of the keys, so I would assume that it should work with it.

I currently have everything running under the voodoo XNU 9.4.0 kernel and have not upgraded to the voodoo xnu 9.5.0 kernel yet. In the past when I have done it, my LAN stops working for some reason. It gets an IP via DHCP but it wont get the router and DNS server info automatically anymore (if I update to 9.5.0). ANy thoughts there? Also, during the install, I disabled the firewire kexts, actually, I just had them not installed because it was causing some wierd issue to come up. Any idea where I can get some good kexts for firewire to work? I need to get my audio working and time machine. Apart form that, it seems all else is going GREAT!!! My next project, once I get this done, is to get this installed off of retail, as I have a legit copy.

Thanks again guys for your quick help and very clear an precise responses. Thanks you very much!

I would prefer to get time machine up and running that way I could back up everything that I have running right now stable right now with out having to reinstall if something goes wrong, such as an update or etc. Right now if I select a drive, partitioned to HSF+, external or internal doesn't matter, it will start to back up/run time machine but then about 10 second into it it will come back with an error saying that it cant find the designated drive even though it is mounted and works fine. I have tried USB, firewire, internal sata, and internal ide, nothing seems to be working right. Any ideas? Thanks again for your EXCELENT HELP!!!

Spydey

Ok, so it looks like I got time machine working. I actually didn't have to do anything. I do have it backing up to the same HDD as my osx86 is installed on but to partition 2. So far it is working! YAY!!!! No if I could only get my firewire working and back it up to an external drive that I have.