Small Earth icon???

[mauly]

Have just been messing around with account settings! and something unexpected happened!! On a restart, the grey setup page appeared and stayed with a small icon that looked like the earth!!!! I pressed and held the power button!! I followed the info to mac-boot..... all is well!!!

Can anyone tell me what happened?

 

[MacsRgr8]

Depends what you saw in detail.

If you saw a grey screen with a blue flashing icon of the earth, then your Mac is trying to NetBoot. (Boot from a NetBoot server instead of the internal HD or CD etc.)
If the Mac actually gets a spinning "small black earth" icon on a grey background after the flashing blue earth icon, it really is booting off a NetBoot server.

But as you stated that you had to type "mac-boot", you pressumably got yourself into OpenFirmware (the BIOS of a Mac... eh.... PowerPC Mac )
Typing "mac-boot" you tell OpenFirmware to carry on starting in normal mode.

If you keep coming into OpenFirmware everytime you (re)start the Mac, try typing the following to reset it:
reset-nvram <ENTER>
reset-all <ENTER>

Your Mac will boot normally hopefully.

 

[FoxyKaye]

If it was blinking at the center of your screen, in a similar position as you'd find the blinking folder-question mark icon if it can't locate an OS, then it may be that your Mac was also looking for a network boot. Generally, this happens for a moderate period of time (long enough to make you think that there's something seriously wrong), and then the system will default to any OS that's on its hard drive and boot. After OS X boots, then you can go into the System Preferences and change your boot disk back to your installed hard drive.