Originally Posted by Mobile Mod
Ok, hoping someone here can help me fix a serious issue with my iMac. I was using it one day and when I tried to bring it out of sleep it went to a black screen and had to hold the power button to turn it off. When I turned it back on the system showed the progress of the startup and then went to a blue screen with my mouse and just sat there. After looking at Apple's site and doing their solution I got as far as getting the login window to show up, but now when I click on my username it says its logging me in and then just takes me right back to the login window. So, can anyone please help me? I tihkn I am running 10.2 but am not sure since this is someone eles's computer.
TIA,
Justin
I have had this happen to me before. Luckily in, in my experience, this has always involved problems within a single user account rather than system wide. The first thing to check is to see if you can successfully log in as a different user. If you do not have a second user created, there is are still ways to solve this.
The method that I have successfully used in the past involves starting up in single user mode. This will boot you to a command line prompt as root. Follow directions to mount the filesystems (the Mac will conveniently tell you what to type). Do not start the system though.
After mounting the disks type the following three lines (with a return at the end of each):
cd /var/db
mv .AppleSetupDone .AppleSetupNotDone
reboot
Now you have fooled your Mac into thinking it is new when it restarts. It will ask you to go through the stages of creating a new admin account (use a different name than your normal account). This will not modify the files in your original account in any way.
It does produce the annoyance of trying to register your computer/OS X with apple again.
If you can login as the new user, it measn that you have corrupted files in your original account. These are usually in ~/Library/Preferences/ but can also be located in ~/.MacOSX/ or other hidden .files
YuSung
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