Strange error on start up

Hi all,

I'm new to Mac (one month) so please forgive me if this has been asked number of times before.

I have repaired permissions today and once completed I decided to reboot. However, all I got was a grey screen with the flashing icon in the middle. The icon is square and raised ( looks like Office 97 ) and has the blue globe on it. It was flashing all the time. I rebooted two or three times but nothing happened.

Then I took the little booklet that came with my iMac (G5) and rebooted with cmnd-option-R-P. It fixed the problem, whatever it was. Wondering what the funny icon was all about, anyone had the similar experience ?

Big Smurf wrote:

I have repaired permissions today and once completed I decided to reboot. However, all I got was a grey screen with the flashing icon in the middle. The icon is square and raised ( looks like Office 97 ) and has the blue globe on it. It was flashing all the time. I rebooted two or three times but nothing happened.

Then I took the little booklet that came with my iMac (G5) and rebooted with cmnd-option-R-P. It fixed the problem, whatever it was. Wondering what the funny icon was all about, anyone had the similar experience ?

You did exactly right. The icon means, I believe, that the computer had become confused about its startup disk - it was looking for a netboot (a cool Mac power feature where another computer on the network can function as the boot disk for your computer):

<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=163041>

By zapping the PRAM, you reset that parameter and made it boot from its own hard disk once again. I don't know why it got confused about this just because you did a permissions repair. m.

Big Smurf wrote:

However, all I got was a grey screen with the flashing icon in the middle. The icon is square and raised ( looks like Office 97 ) and has the blue globe on it.

Somehow your Startup Disk setting was changed to the Network Startup option.