Tiger Start Up Delay
I’ve noticed that sometimes, Mac OS X 10.4 will start up more slowly than usual, and may appear to get “stuck”. This is characterized by the start up progress bar stopping before it reaches the end, but there is no crash message and the mouse pointer still moves. After a few moments, however, the progress window disappears and the login window appears as usual.
As long as your mouse cursor still moves around, and especially if it’s not showing itself as a rainbow pinwheel, Mac OS X has not crashed. Impatience at such times is discouraged. Giving in to the urge to force the computer to shut down or other acts of desperation can cause harm to your computer by interrupting hard disk activity.
Computers are fragile machines. They need to be handled with care. Whenever your computer seems to be acting strangely, follow a few basic steps to see if you can work out what the problem is before resorting to drastic measures. In Mac OS X, launch the Activity Monitor if possible, or press the Command-Option-Escape key combination to bring up the Force Quit dialogue box. If start up times are slow, be patient; consult the Console logs when start up is complete, to see if there are any processes failing to start. (Console messages really are not that difficult to understand, if they’re important, although many might sound important and actually be benign, so don’t panic.)