Reinstalling OS X
Thanks to everyone who weighed in with the suggestions on how to fix my OS X login issue.
I learned a lot about OS X today and had some fun hacking around in single user mode.
But after I tried all that, and nothing worked, I figured the only way out of the mess was a reinstall which I am in the midst of.
Andrew asked why I posted this question on my blog instead of a forum designed for this kind of question. Well first, I figured there were a lot of readers who knew the answer. And I was right. There are some super smart people who read this blog. And second, by posting on my blog, I was able to post a couple screen shots of the problem that made it easier for me to articulate the issue.
Comments (Archived):
And you are putting it out to a much wider demographic. I’d have never come across this topic by choice.
Fred:Well, I’m glad you at least got it done if not ideally so! On a go-forward basis, I’d highly recommend having an external Firewire back-up drive that contains an installer disc image (.dmg) as well as tech tools. With a cable, you can boot from that and run diagnostics on a funky machine. (This is the way you’ll see Geniuses do it at an Apple store.) This has been mentioned in the earlier post.Lacie has a new series of drives that stack underneath the new Airport Extreme so you can do your back-ups across a wireless network. Although I’m not 100% sure of this, I would guess you can partition one of these external drives to contain the stuff (a .dmg installer and Disk Warrior, say) you need in a Firewire repair setting while still being able to use the external drive as a normal back-up destination when all’s “normal.”I realize this doesn’t help with what you went through, but it may be helpful going forward.
I completely agree, there are no doubt a lot of super smart people reading this blog. However, while the answers were detailed and well thought out (not to mention, totally over my head) they weren’t exactly correct, as they didn’t fix your problem. It’s interesting though, and you got me thinking… maybe “Web 3.0” has nothing to do with social networks and virtual worlds and multimedia, but the idea of a seamless web.For example, if I’m the type of person that likes to answer questions about OS X maybe those questions should naturally come to me, even if I’ve never heard of A VC. In the same way, if you have a question about OS X, you shouldn’t have to seek out a specific forum for that, it should naturally appear at the doorstep of those who want to answer it. I suppose we’re moving in that direction with aggregation, but the whole idea of specific webpages and destinations seems rather outdated to me. I’d like to see a more seamless experience.A little off topic, but just a general thought.