MS Word keeps crashing on me which I haven’t figure out how to prevent. It’s sporadic and I’ll often go an hour or more without a crash. Sometimes entire days. Who knows what fickle beast lies within it’s bloated lines waiting to surprise me and destroy my progress.
I needed something to remind me to save my work periodically so I whipped up a quick growl script to pop up every couple of minutes. It’s easier than you think. Read the rest of this entry »
On numerous occassions in the last three days I’ve restored my OS but not been able to get it to boot. Here’s an easy solution. Just download this zip file (bootef.zip) and (from the readme in the zip file):
Copy the folder “bootefi” and all included files/folders to the root directory of either a USB Thumb drive, a USB hard drive, or a second internal drive. Be sure that either the Thumb drive, the USB hard drive, or the second internal drive have a volume name.
Insert the OSX Boot DVD and allow the DVD to boot up. Install OSX from the DVD. Allow the DVD to reboot. This time don’t install the OS, but click on the Utilities menu and select “Terminal”.
Then enter the following commands
sudo -s (then enter your root password)
cd /Volumes/usbvolname/bootefi
where usbvolname is the volume name of the USB Thumb drive, USB hard drive, or second internal drive where the “bootefi” folder was copied to.
./bootefi.sh installvolumename
where installvolumename is the volume name of the drive that OSX was installed to. The installvolumename should be surrounded by double quotes. Example: ./bootefi.sh “MacHD” or ./bootefi.sh “Macintosh HD”
Now simply follow the prompts and choices based on the type of bootloader install. The choices are EFI or Darwin X86 bootloader and for an EFI bootloader, mbr or guid type partition on the OSX hard drive.
At the end, the script will ask to either reboot or stay in Terminal and reboot later.
Before OSX boots up, make sure to remove the OSX install DVD, so that it won’t interfere.
If you have a problem where OSX boots up but stops at the blue screen, it probably means something is broken and you’re facing some heartache.
Step 1 is always to see what the error is. Boot into verbose mode and see where it hangs. I recently ran into this behavior and the issue was the LoginWindow application, which shows you the user list so that you can log in. When booting regularly, I’d get to the blue screen and see the spinner, then the spinner would vanish and after a moment return. Wash, rinse, repeat, over and over again. This is the error you see when booting to verbose mode (type in -v when the boot options come up):
/System/Library/CoreServices/loginwindow.app/Contents/MacOS/loginwindow: Login Window Application Started
Before you go reinstalling everything, there’s an easy solution, found here:
Note that case is important and be careful. Some of these commands are dangerous, since you are going to be root.
Start up in Single-User mode by restarting the computer. After the chime press and hold down the COMMAND-S keys until you see white text on a black background. When this has finished you will see a prompt ending in ‘#’, although there may be other messages. Enter the following commands after the prompt:
/sbin/fsck -fyPress RETURN. Wait a few seconds for 8-10 lines of output. If the last line says repairs were carried out, repeat this command until you get a message ‘The volume <yourdiskname> appears to be OK’. Then continue with:/sbin/mount -uw / cd /Library/Preferences rm com.apple.loginwindow.plist rm com.apple.windowserver.plist cd /Library/Caches rm -r * cd /System/Library rm Extensions.kextcache cd /System/Library/Caches rm -r * rebootPress RETURN after each command.This should now take you to a proper login screen after the normal boot sequence. You should then Repair Permissions by using Disk Utility (in your /Applications/Utilities folder).