Can’t login after crash

[smileywise]

Over the weekend, we had a power outage in the office, and now it is impossible to log into one of our XServe G5s. At the local login screen, if you enter a username and password, it just displays the message, “logging in” and hangs after you hit enter. It also will not accept connections via ssh. I rebooted in single user mode and ran fsck, and it said that it found errors and corrected them, but still to no avail. What would be the next step to bring this machine back to life?

Thanks,
Jon

[Detrius]

Have you tried logging in as root? Have you tried SSHing in as root? How long are you waiting for SSH? Note that root is not defined in open directory, and root’s home folder is on your boot drive.

Try running DiskWarrior instead of just fsck. Note that overlapped files/extents are a very bad thing that fsck can’t fix and that DiskWarrior only attempts. Try running Tech Tool Pro’s hard drive tests–the surface scan more specifically. Run the Apple Hardware Test that came with the machine.

In general, issues are not likely to be hardware, but if you can’t figure out what is going on, it’s good to get the hardware checks out of the way; if you find bad hardware, no amount of software troubleshooting is going to permanently resolve your issues.

[Author]

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