Global Reset

I ended up having to power-cycle the mini. To my horror, it wouldn’t boot back up. It got to the “Starting Mac OS X” dialog, with a nice status bar that would fill. Then that dialog would disappear, the hard drive would go silent, and I ended up staring at a blue background for about 15 minutes. The first thing I tried was rebooting again… You may not realize that just a couple of reboots easily eats up a half hour of your time because the Mac Mini is so slow. It may be time to invest in a quad-core G5, since I have accepted my place in the cult of Mac.

In any case, I decided to try booting from my external hard drive. It currently has about a week old backup of my main drive that I made with Carbon Copy Cloner. I selected the “make bootable” option in CCC, but that doesn’t seem to make a difference. When I booted while holding down the Option key, I only saw my internal hard drive as a boot choice. What to do next?

After falling back to an x86 Windows PC for help, I found the suggestion of booting from the OS X Tiger disk. From there, I could run Disk Utility and check/repair any partition information or the permissions on important system files. I ran that and found that there was a “slight problem” with my volume header and it was repairable by Disk Utility. Elated, I rebooted again expecting success. But I still ended up at that same blue background.

At this point, I was thinking about unplugging everything and taking my computer to a service center for the first time since 1992 (when I needed to upgrade my 512kb of RAM to 640kb). This is quite a humiliating defeat for a long-time nerd and someone who actually got a degree in Computer Engineering.

I decide to try the startup disk again, but this time focus on the Terminal app. Note that I have no clue what the startup sequence for Mac OS X is, but it seems I can grok most of it by reading “/etc/rc”. The last line of that file shows a process that, from its name, appears to be waiting on the initial login window to show up, which seems like just about the time that nothing starts happening in my boot up process. So I tried to figure out how that Login Window process got kicked off as it didn’t seem to be in “/etc/rc”. I finaly found a reference to loginwindow.app in my “/var/log/system.log”.

Nov  3 23:23:40 miniscule 
   /System/Library/CoreServices/loginwindow.app/Contents/MacOS/loginwindow: 
   Login Window Application Started
Nov  3 23:23:41 miniscule loginwindow[171]: 
   Login Window Started Security Agent
Nov  3 23:23:42 miniscule DirectoryService[38]: Failed Authentication 
   return is being delayed due to over five recent 
   auth failures for username: shughes.

Well now, that’s odd. I’m not sure how there could be 5 recent auth failures since I certainly haven’t been trying to authenticate myself since the crash and my only way in (ssh) doesn’t accept password authentication. Checking “/var/log/secure.log” told a similar story.

Nov  3 23:25:44 miniscule SecurityAgent[178]: Autologin user authenticated.
Nov  3 23:26:00 miniscule com.apple.SecurityServer: authinternal failed 
   to authenticate user shughes.

I looked around for a way to disable “Autologin”. It’d been so long since I rebooted, I didn’t even remember it was enabled. I couldn’t find it in any of the etc files, so it’s probably stored in /Library in an obscure .plist. One day I’ll need to get to the bottom of how all of this is laid out. The solution which finally worked for me was to use the Tiger startup disk’s Reset Password utility. This allows you to select a Mac OS X volume and reset the user password for any particular user (which isn’t stored in the usual unix-y places). After resetting the password, it booted up fine. It even “Auto-logged in” with the new password.

So I get to keep my geek creds for at least one more day and avoid the service center. I still might swing by an Apple store to drool over those quad-core G5’s this weekend.