two things to try
 

Here's two things you can try. Try first one and then the other, not both in one try. The first one will only work if you have Jaguar (OS 10.2) installed.

1) Safe Boot:
Type the command:
reboot

This will restart your Mac. But before it restarts, hold down the Shift key and keep on holding it until you (hopefully) get a message about "Safe Boot". Your computer should proceed to come up and you should get to the Finder.


2) Remove your com.apple.loginwindow.plist preferences file.
Type the command:
mv /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist ~/Desktop

(The ~ is the symbol on the top left of the keyboard, to the left of the number 1 key.)
Now restart by typing the command:
reboot

The safe boot still takes me to the console.
I typed in the mv line, it says:
override rw-r--r-- root/admin for /Users/theweaze/Desktop/com.apple.loginwindow.plist?

I wasn't quite sure what to do so i typed in "y" and it says:
mv: rename /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist to /Users/theweaze/Desktop/com.apple.loginwindow.plist: No such file or directory.
The reboot command doesn't work either.

Hello,

Try this:

And to move the plist file use sudo too:



v

The first one says: The privileges have been partially verified or repaired on the selected volume.
The second one says: No such file or directory

find out which file or directory doesn't exist
 

Okay, that last error mesage is rather interesting. We'd like to find out which file or directory it is referring to when it says "no such file or directory". Could you please type in the following commands and carefully copy the results here?

ls -ld /Library/Preferences
ls -l /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist
ls -ld ~


And going back to the results of the repairPermissions command, look back in the output of that command to see if there are any error messages. If it says "privileges have been partially verified or repaired" then it seems that some privileges have not been fixed. We want to find out which ones and why not.
If the output of repairPermissions has scrolled off your screen, you need to do it again and be ready to copy down errors as they scroll by.

By the way, if you have a digital camera available, it would be very useful if you took photos showing the output of these various things we have been asking you to do and posted those photos to a web site we could access. We might notice something in the details that are difficult for you to type in.

When I enter the first command I get:
Verifying permissions on disk
Group differs on ./private/var/run/utmp, should be 0, group is 1
Owner and group corrected on ./private/var/run/utmp
The privileges have been partially verified or repaired on the selected volume.

When I type the command, I get:
ls -ld /Library/Preferences:
drwxrwxr-x 25 root admin 850 Feb 3 15:03 /Library/Preferences

ls -l /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist:
No such file or directory (that was typed with a space before the "-l" and a space before the "/Library"

ls -ld ~:
drwxrwxrwx 19 theweaze admin 646 Jan 17 11:33 /Users/theweaze

fsck
 

Hmm, so now it seems like your ls -l com.apple.loginwindow.plist file is gone even though you got an error message "no such file or directory" when you earlier tried to move it.
Just for curiousity, please type the following:
ls -l /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist.bak

But back to trying to fix your machine.
You said earlier that you had run 'fsck' several times.
Please tell us details about how you ran this and what the results were. Did you run it in single-user mode? Did you repeat it until it said that the "disk appears to be ok"?

When I typed that I got:
No such file or directory.

I don't know what single-user mode is. The /sbin/fsck -y doesn't appear to do anything in the console that I am stuck in now. I rant he /sbin/fsck -y by holding Apple+S at start-up and it works there. I ran it about 5 times and it never said that the disk appears to be ok. I gave up after a while.

Apple+S gets you into single-user mode.
If fsck is not able to repair the disk - i.e. it still finds problems after multiple passes, then you have major disk issues. There is little point in continuing to try to get anything else working (e.g. getting Finder to come up) if you have disk problems. You need to fix the disk before doing anything else. If fsck can't fix it, one option is to use commercial software like DiskWarrior (I wouldn't recommend Norton from what I've heard). Otherwise, erase the disk and start over.

Ouch, ok thanks for the help