[HM] Os X won't boot up on iMac

[Duane Murphy]

--- At Fri, 16 Jan 2004 06:27:49 +0000, janesprando at comcast.net wrote:

>I have an iMac that boots up in 9 and 10. I have been using 9.2.2, but
>tried to boot up in X.  The blue apple appeared and then that little
>clock with the dots started going around. It stopped and I got this message:
>
>/etc/master.password: no such file or directory
>/etc/master.password: no such file or directory (it did say it twice)
>sh-2.05a#
>
>What does this mean and how do I fix it?

There is actually a note about this in the Apple Knowledge Base.

<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106908>

What happens is that while you are in 9.2.2 you managed to throw away a
couple of files that are _very_ important to OS X.

There should be a folder called private at the root of your boot disk.
You have to boot into single user more and type in some Unix commands
(nice, huh!) in order to restore the files that were removed while you
were in OS 9.

I solved this problem for my father in law by making the files hidden in
OS 9. This has no affect on OS X when you reboot as it completely ignores
the hidden flag on the files.

 ...Duane