It should be pretty intuitive.

However, my best advice to you… backup to some other media, and do a clean install. Format and erase the drive, clean install, then copy your user data over. Reinstall your applications from scratch. In the end, those takes some time, let time than you probably have spent in the rabbit hole you are in now

There is also a “Mail PDF” option in the same menu, though you will need to have a desktop email application set up to use that. Web based email will not work for that feature.

My suggestion is to try to find a printer that is airport comptable, and use that for your wireless access if you must use wireless. I myself, never buy wireless printers, and find them to be more trouble than they are worth. Keep in mind this comes from a large part of my day job being doing IT for others.

My best advise, avoid the all in one printers. Do you really need a fax, if not, do not get an all in one. Get a solid printer. You may need a scanner, see if you can find a scan and print, with no fax built in. See if it works out of the box with no drivers installed. Apple is pretty good about having all the drivers you ned already in place.

They even have a built in scanner app that seems to work with a ton of scanners out there, no drivers or installs needed.

Generally, I look for what it is I am trying to accomplish, hit up Amazon, and start reading the reviews. If I find anyone complaining about Mac Support, I knock that one off my list of possibilities.

Macword.com does a great job of testing printers, though they can be a little behind the times with as fast as these thigns come out.

Myself, I have gone with a sub 80.00 black and white toner printer, for printing streetmaps and other misc needs. If I need a color print of a photograph, I just can not compete with the prince and quality of Costco. There is not a single home printer on the market that will use real chemicals to print your images. The cost of the ink and paper alone is enough to cover you at Costco for a year, easily.

2) Introduction of bad software or drivers. After a clean install and everything is working, install one software. If all is well, move on to the next software. Eventually, you may find out which software it is. In most cases it will be something like printer drivers, mouse drivers tablet drivers, or other things that are more deep rooted into your system than something simple like photoshop of other “Desktop” style applicaation.

The first trick you can try, if you can get into the machine enough, is create a new user account, login to that account, if the problems go away, migrate your data to that account.

I tend to just go for the clean install, so I can pin it down. I do not like the mystery of not knowing what cased the problem.

I would suggest that you immediately get a backup drive if you do not have one, plug it in, and set up time machine to perform a backup.

With that done, buy a new hard drive to replace the old, and then do a restore from the old backup with Time Machine.

Your data currently is at risk for catastrophic loss. Luckily, you have been given a second change, which is more than many get is cases like this. As soon as you can, get a backup, replace the drive, and restore your machine.

Thanks for replying. I started in single user mode like you said and typed in /sbin/fsck -yf and this came back

as it was checking the catalog file “inncorect block count for file PACESupport.plist” should be 0 instead of 1, as it was checking the Extended attributes file, there were some issues about overlapping a couple of files and the volume header needs minor repair because of the invalid block free count, its talking about how it cannot create links to all corrupt files.
now it says the volume was repaired sucessfully.

looks like everything is not ok, will backup data as soon as i can, will run verbose again and the other

Restart with Command-S held down, this is single user mode. If that can boot up, enter into the prompt:

/sbin/fsck -yf

This will do the best it can to try to repair, what appears to be a failing hard drive. If that does not work, you can boot from the installer DVD, open Disk Utility, and see if you can repair the drive from within there.

If that too does not work, it is time for a new drive, and to restore your data. If you do not have backups of your data, you can look into data recovery, which is very expensive. You could also give it a go yourself by simply buying the top two data recovery apps and trying them yourself.

Let me know how the above steps work out.

I just started in Verbrose Mode and this is what reads:

“display: family specific matching fails”
previous shutdown cause: 3

kld_load_from_memory() failed for module
/system/library/extensions/IO80211family.kext/contents/plugins/airportAtheros5424.kext/contents/macos/airportatheros5424

a link/load error occured for kernel extension

kextd_watch_volumes: couldn’t set up diskarb sessions

disk0s2: Oxe0030005 (Undefinded) . (shows that over 50 times)

I hope I have provided you the right info, if not, please let me know.

Thanks

Thanks

While you could probably troubleshoot this, and solve it, by starting in single user mode, it would require extensive knowledge of how to manage the system from a command line exclusively.

If files are missing or damaged, you would then further have to learn how to either mount an external drive, get the machine on a network so you can copy files over a network etc.

Even then, you would need to know what files, what permissions/users /groups to set them to. Finally, once you get it working, you never know what the previous owner has done to the machine; what they have installed; what they have fiddled with based on the ill advice of others.

My suggestion, since none of the data on the machine is yours. Take the original CD/DVD’s that came with the machine, and do a nice clean reinstall of the operating system.

If you were not given these original CD’s/DVD’s, you can buy them from a link on our site at Amazon, or ebay has them for reasonable prices. Be careful with the eBay sellers, only under certain cases are you even allowed to transfer a license to OS X. You can not resell the installers that came with a Macintosh computer, you can only resell official standalone installers. Your machine does not support Snow Leopard, so you are stuck with Mac OS X 10.5

This will start you from scratch, and is the only reliable way to know your own new data is safe from any old mistakes that could follow you through any attempt to repair the current state of the machine.

If there is no disk in the drive, use the eject key on the top row of your keyboard. They Eject key looks like a line with an arrow.

If that is not working for you, you can open iTunes, and the disk will show up in the list on the left, there will be the same eject icon there, which you can use to eject.

If you have a really stubborn and stuck disc, restart your machine, hold the mouse button down just after you hear the start up tone on the Mac, and it will eventually spit the disc out.

the error I have is along the lines of:

dyld: Symbol not found __cg_png_create_info_struct Referenced from /System/Library/Frameworks/AppliatinServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/ImageIO.framework/Versions/A/ImageIO

some preliminary footwork I did seemed to suggest that the DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH shouldn’t contain the /usr/X11/lib path in it, but mine does – and the same places suggest that I shouldn’t remove it (even though I did, just to see if it fixed it – and it did)!. what is the more appropriate way to fix the problem?