Starting Up Into UNIX

[eman13]

HELP!!
I recently reinstalled OSX onto one of my hard drives. When I tried to log in, my password wouldn't work. No sweat. Just change the password with the Installer CD.
When I did, I logged on fine - RIGHT INTO UNIX!!!!
Has anyone ever heard of this kind of thing. I'm sure some people might find this feature useful, and I would share my knowledge, but I have no idea what happened.
I can't remember enough about UNIX to run OSX from there, or even if that is a possibility. All I can do is exit back to the log in window.

I'm going to reinstall again and see if that does the trick. But I would still like to know what happened. Any thoughts?

-eman

 

[Satcomer]

Ok, don't panic. when you say Unix mode do you mean the Single-User mode or Open Firmware screen?

If the screen is black with white writing then it is the Single User mode. At tis mode type (for Panther-10.3.x): fsck -f , and if the system is Jaguar(10.2.x) then type: fsck -y . This command with test do limited fixes on your drive. Then after the screen reports all is ok type: reboot. If it is the Open Firmware mode the type: reset-nvram . Then after that type: reset-all .

Now, OS X should not be doing this on it's own. I would say one of three things happened 1) bad install 2) bad hard drive 3) bad third party RAM. So if I were you I would pull all the third party RAM to see if boots right. If it does you found the problem. If not at the Single-User mode (mentioned above) is the Unix mode do the mention above fsck -f ( or y for Jaguar) and keep running it until the screen reports no errors. Then type reboot to see if that works. If it doesn't, go into the Open Firmware mode (mentioned in the link above) and run the above web page commands. If that doesn't fix it then do a full re-install. If that doesn't work then the drive is broken.

Good luck.

 

[michaelsanford]

Exit to the login window? So you say that the computer boots normally but when you enter your username and password in the box it drops you into a shell (that extends to the borders of the screen, that is, it's not a window but looks kinda like DOS)?

That's not open-firmware (you can only get to that by botting into it, you can't log into it).

There is a way to make certain users do that, in Jaguar you used to be able to log in with username ">console" and get exactly that. Maybe you somehow corrupted your NI database (NetInfo, which stores all your user info like your shell, login photo, password, home folder location, etc) that caused this anomalous behavior.

Did you create your own user with admin privilages, or are you just using the root user?