Spinning Wheel of Death

[mortstar]

Having a very strange problem with MacBooks that we have joined to the Active Directory here.

 

Last year we bought 6 Apple Macs and using some great stuff from Mike Bombich's site I got a nice little login/logout setup so that each user was given the same 'experience' and had SSO as well as home drives mounted on login - lovely! This all worked perfectly for a year.

 

Then Art buy Photoshop Elements and rather than just install on each machine individually, I thought I'd just edit the image and pass it round to each of the MacBooks.

 

This all seemed to work fine, but a week later the machines started to fail to boot and would just sit on a grey screen with the spinning wheel - forever!!! without getting to the login screen.

 

After re-imaging the same thing happens, they work for a while - then suddenly when they are in the process of booting they get the same problem but at varying lengths of time, some a few hours later, some days. I've booted with verbose mode on (cmd + v) and it is getting a DirectoryService failure - so I'm guessing it is something to do with the join to Active Directory

 

The error that keeps coming up in verbose is

"macbook-05 netinfod local [78] file_init failed: Remote system error

macbook-05 netinfod local [78] ni_init failed: Remote system error

macbook-05 netinfod local [78] start_service: Remote system error -exiting

macbook-05 DirectoryService[45]: CNetInfoPlugin::Initialize - notify_get_state failed over last minute (status -1)\n"

 

This loops and each time "netinfod local [xx]" increments by 1.

 

I've not done anything differently when joining to AD, the only changes to the old image is Mac OS X updates and Photoshop Elements.

 

Mac OS X 10.4, no Mac Server.

 

Any help muchly appreciated!

[Rozzer]

If i were you i would put the OS X CD in press C drive before the chime and do a repair on the disk and verify.

 

Ross