HELP! Need reformatting help using command line OS X

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piXieChickFLA

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I have OS X 10.2 on my imac.... about a month ago someone (a pc user) unknowingly screwed up my computer by changing info in my admin settings. now i am unable to login.... i have tried every combo of passwords and logins that I have used, including root, still with no luck. I now have gotten over the fact that I will never retrieve my files and am ready to reformat, the problem is... when I hold C during start up it seems to be mounting the cd and all of a sudden it stops and it freezes... now I want to know how I can reformat from a command line prompt, it seems to be the only thing i can get into.... Can you help me with this? I have tried talking to several other people on mac sites with no luck, I really hope I can use my mac again... I do miss it so... :)
Thanks a bunch...
TTFN,
piXie :)
 
You've gone without your Mac for a month?? :eek:
They key problem here is that you can't boot off the OS X CD; this allows you to reset the password. Can you boot from any CDs? Unless your CD drive or other part of the computer is faulty there should be no reason why the Mac freezes when booting from CD... make sure you have all external devices except the keyboard and mouse unplugged when you are booting. This means ALL of them, printer, scanner, external firewire drive I hope you have, etc.
Anyway there is a way to force the creation of a new user, but it requires booting from CD... if you can't do that then there's no point.
You can't normally reformat a drive you have booted up from... only another volume.
 
Try this. Boot into single user mode by holding down the Apple and S keys straight after the startup chime. When you get a >prompt type "fsck -y" keep doing this until it says your disk appears ok. Now type "mount -uw /" and at the next prompt type "SystemStarter" when all that has finished type "exit" and hopefully you'll be in.
 
Ok... Now yesterday I tried zapping the PRAM <CMD, Option, P, R> During startup and let it chime a few times... Then I tried the CD again and a linux type prompt came up <it was a gray screen with white writing> it would not let me go into dir... I know this screen was not supposed to come up so I tried the above procedure again 2x, the first time an error screen came up telling me to restart which I did, then the second time it tried loading for over an hour<white screen with gray apple in center w/ the load icon> so I kinda gave up for the night... Will be frustating myself again after work today... Any more suggestions would be great...
I have tried booting from 2 cds <I have two copies of the same version> All external drives are disconnected, I only have keyboard and printer connected. I will try fsck -y tonight....
Thank you all for your help, very much appreciated!!!
 
Ok... I finally got somewhere... I left the computer off over night, during initial startup i pressed cmd, option, p, r. Then restarted with cd in while pressing C. The installer came up, I changed the password for my login, I restarted again and logged in, It brought up yet another DOS type prompt called "Darwin" it requested my login then password, it let me in with the new password that I had selected. But it continued with the prompt, I tried dir among other commands, but not much happened. Now was it something I did wrong in installer? I tried repairing disks, but it would only let me verify disk not repair disk, also, it did not let me verify/repair permissions.... most of the menus were not available to use. Where can I go from here?
 
Well, if you're still ready to reformat and reinstall, then you've got the problem solved by being able to once again boot from the CD.

It sounds like the login screen and/or window manager is failing, and that's why you're being prompted with a UNIX-style prompt instead of the GUI of OS X.

I would venture to say that being able to restore your system to its original configuration (i.e., windows, login window, GUI, etc.) is probably gone, although some may disagree with me -- if you're not familiar with UNIX, then there's not much you can do with the UNIX prompt. I'm assuming you come from a Windows/DOS background, since you're trying to do a "dir" command at the UNIX prompt, which won't work. That's Microsoft DOS style, and the UNIX equivalent of "dir" is "ls". You can type "ls" and get a listing of files and folders there, but DOS commands aren't going to get you very far.

If you want to reformat and reinstall, boot from the OS X installer CD (by holding 'c' like before), and when the installer pops up, go up to the menubar at the top of the screen and look for "Disk Utility" in one of the menus. Select that, and you can use this utility to reformat (it's called "initialize" for Mac computers) your hard drive. After that's done, you can launch the installer again (by either booting again from the CD or, it may bring you back to the installer when you quit "Disk Utility") and you can reinstall the system from there.

If you don't wanna reformat and reinstall at this point, then perhaps someone else here can help you with the UNIX prompt you're seeing -- I know quite a few commands, but in my personal opinion, if my machine was to the point where nothing would load and I couldn't get back to the login window, I would just reformat and reinstall... I've got all my application CDs handy so reinstalling the programs and what-not wouldn't be that much of a task.

Good luck, and I hope this helps!
 
piXieChickFLA said:
I tried repairing disks, but it would only let me verify disk not repair disk, also, it did not let me verify/repair permissions.... most of the menus were not available to use. Where can I go from here?
Click to expand...
You can't repair the startup disk so you'll either have to run disk utility from the Install CD (available from under the installer menu) OR run fsck from single user mode as outline above. fsck is exactly the same process as Disk Utility's repair disk, just without the pretty interface.
 
If you start the MacOSX installed, you may be given the option to "clean install while keeping the user's data". Do that. This is probably the best that can happen now.
 
Dagaz, What you are telling me to try is what I did... and the Disk Util will not let me...
"I tried repairing disks, but it would only let me verify disk not repair disk, also, it did not let me verify/repair permissions.... most of the menus were not available to use. " Disk as in HD (not actual CD)... again I am able to Verify but not Repair, and neither Verify nor Repair Permissions. Thanks.
 
piXieChickFLA said:
Dagaz, What you are telling me to try is what I did... and the Disk Util will not let me...
"I tried repairing disks, but it would only let me verify disk not repair disk, also, it did not let me verify/repair permissions.... most of the menus were not available to use. " Disk as in HD (not actual CD)... again I am able to Verify but not Repair, and neither Verify nor Repair Permissions. Thanks.
Click to expand...
Are you trying to do this from the Install CD as per my above post? If so you have some serious problems with your OS. As stated above you can not repair the disk that you started up from, so disk utility can't repair the startup disk.
 
dagaz said:
Are you trying to do this from the Install CD as per my above post? If so you have some serious problems with your OS. As stated above you can not repair the disk that you started up from, so disk utility can't repair the startup disk.
Click to expand...

Yes, from the start up disk, but I am not actually trying to repair the startup CD itself, just the HD. Thanks all!!!
 
you can only repair permissions on a valid OS X bootable volume. If you are clicking on you hard drive icon in Disk Utility but can't repair permissions, and the machine boots up into UNIX (it's BSD UNIX, not Linux!!) then some crucial files are missing, renamed, moved or mangled. This does mean a reinstall of OS X to get back on track.

If you want to learn more about OS Xs command line interface, there are heaps of useful sites for learning Terminal Basics..
 
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