Recovering from blue screen login problems

Jan 27, '03 09:09:52AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

I know a lot of people suffered from the login screen just never changing into the desktop after some crash, and uptil now it never happened to me. However, after a Medal of Honor - Allied Assault crash earlier today, all my apps, including the WindowServer, quit, and there was nothing I could do to log back on. fsck, reparing permissions from the install cd, nothing did the trick.

I searched a lot on the web, a lot of solutions were offered, but none did the trick. Finally found someone mention that it could be a pref file issue, or a corrupt font. It turns out the solution is simple:

  1. Boot in single user mode and issue a mount -uw / command to mount the root filesystem as writable.

  2. Change the name of /Users -> your_username -> Library to /Users -> your_username -> Library.bak or something else.

  3. Type exit
OS X will boot and will create a new ~/Library folder along the way. Now you just have to isolate the culprit, dragging prefs one by one in the new pref folder and logging in again. If that doesn't do it, then drag your fonts. When you drag the corrupted .plist, the WindowServer will crash again, and you just have to repeat the procedure listed above.

Hope this helps.

NB: it's better to not have automatic logging in activated at all ;o)

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