[booboo]

In a few hours I'll be visiting a friend who has an iMac widescreen.

They can login and sometimes get to the desktop before it freezes, sometimes clicking on the Dock will cause the freeze. Apparently it's been 'playing up' for a couple of months....

AFAIK this iMac won't boot from 9, which would have made it easy for me to do what I want to do.

So I've had them do fsck -y and startup from the DVD to repair permissions, but this hasn't helped.

I've had nasty freezes in OS X myself and I traced them to damaged user pref's.

What I'd like to do next is move these pref's folders (say to the trash), and I'm assuming this can be done from the 'Safe Mode' screen before the desktop loads. Anyone able to help me with the commands - or point me in a direction where I might find them?

Advice on this and any other suggestions appreciated.

[Gul Banana]

The first command to type in Single User Mode (not Safe Mode, and hold command+s at startup to get into it) is "/sbin/mount -uw /" - that will let you actually modify the hard drive. Then, the basic commands you will need are these:
"pwd" - show which directory you are in
"cd" - change directory, using either the full path or relative to where you are
"ls" - list the files in the current directory
"ls -la | less" - list the files in a format that lets you scroll up and down
"rm" - remove a file
"cat" - view the contents of a file
"mv" - move a file to somewhere else.

An example of what you might do:
> /sbin/mount/ -uw /
> pwd
/home/users/whatever
> cd Library/Preferences
> ls -la | less
(long list of prefs files)
> rm com.apple.thepreferencethathasbeenscrewingeverythi ngup.plist

And finally..
> sync
> reboot
..which forces your changes to be written to disk and restarts. Alternatively, you could just type "exit" which attempts to take the system multiuser...

As a more drastic attempt, you could move his entire Library directory so that he could at least log in and debug stuff;
> cd ~
> mv Library Library.old

[booboo]

Originally posted by Gul Banana:
The first command to type in Single User Mode (not Safe Mode, and hold command+s at startup to get into it) is "/sbin/mount -uw /" - that will let you actually modify the hard drive. ....

Thanks for this. I'll give it a go....