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Macintosh

Single User Boot the Mac

April 25, 2011 20:34:11.475

I've had a few kernel panics in the last couple of days, so when I got back from work today I pinged Apple (I have Apple Care, so that makes the whole thing easier). It turns out that booting into single user mode and running fsck is pretty simple - you reboot, and hold down command-s on reboot. That drops you to a root prompt, where you can do anything you know how to do in Unix. Pretty cool :)

posted by James Robertson

Comments

Re: Single User Boot the Mac

[Tom Sattler] April 26, 2011 8:49:47.645

Uh .... Cool? Why do you have to reboot to get a root prompt? Can't you just open an xterm and type "su", like in a normal Unix-variant operating system?

Re: Single User Boot the Mac

[anonymous] April 26, 2011 12:47:49.440

You want to be in single user mode to use fsck -fy, mostly. And no, on a mac you can't do that. You can use sudo in a terminal though

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