[P1] OS X Help Please

[leigh]

On Tuesday, March 18, 2003, at 05:27  PM, Luke Hinman wrote:

> o.k. i guess what i am saying is that i can boot it into 9. then go to
> prefs, startup disk... then i see the 9.1 on my firefly hard drive. 
> and then
> the internal drive (x and 9.1(?) are available) i thought it was 
> supposed to
> be 9.2... anyway i select the x build and click restart... the gray x 
> apple
> comes on and the dots go round and round, then blue screen, then the 
> boot
> screen showing that it is loading some stuff (it is not taking as long 
> as it
> should during this stage)... then to the blue screen of death (no more
> flashing of the desktop picture). i guess os 9 mac first aid can't 
> repair
> permissions if i boot of the firefly and try fixing the internal x 
> build?
> thanks.
>

Which version of Mac OS X is it? If you have Jaguar, I would recommend 
an archive install. Mac OS 9 knows nothing of Mac OS X permissions, and 
is exactly why you can do things like boot into Mac OS 9 and delete the 
/mach_kernel file.

Try this ... boot into Mac OS X, holding Command-S for single-user 
boot. After running fsck, carefully type the following:

/sbin/mount -uw /

then press return. Note the space between the w and the /

Then, type:

rm /Users/UserName/Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist   
<press return>
rm /Users/UserName/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist   <press 
return>
rm /Users/UserName/Library/Preferences/loginwindow.plist   <press 
return>

Where "UserName" is obviously your user name. ;o)

(NOTE: you don't have to type the entire thing -- you can press tab to 
complete after typing a few characters. Be careful -- make sure that it 
completes to the intended file)

then, for good measure, type:

rm /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist  <press return>
rm /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver.plist  <press return>

then type exit.

I am curious -- since I have not really followed this whole story, what 
happened to get it into this state?