Repair broken symbolic links after Norton Utilities problem

Jan 19, '04 09:42:00AM

Contributed by: sascha.leib

I know, I should have read the web discussions first, but we "expert users" tend to think we know everything better anyway, and so I just ran Norton DiskDoctor to clean up my OS X start volume. The result: After the next reboot, a black screen with a messy error instead of my crisp "Panther" desktop.

I quickly found out what went wrong: Mr. Norton did not actually "repair" the BSD (U*ix) flags of the symbolic links in the boot partition's root directory, but changed them to files. As a result, my Mac could't find it's settings in the /etc/ directory any more, simply because there was no directory any more. Although the boot process ends in a shell prompt, you can't do much there, because the file system is still mounted as "Read-Only" - and no way to go to the Finder. Now what to do?

Simple: Boot the installation CD. Select Terminal from the Apple menu, and type a few simple commands. First, since now the CD is your boot disk, you need to navigate to the right disk. Type:

% cd /Volumes/BOOTDISKNAME

If you are unsure about the name of your boot disk, you can just type cd /Volumes/ and the first few letters of the disk name, and then press Tab. This should usually give you the right result. Alternatively, you can do:

% cd /Volumes
% ls
to get a list of all the partitions and disks which are mounted at this time. Next, you need to delete the broken links:
% rm etc
% rm tmp
% rm var
And finally, you just create them again:
% ln -s private/etc etc
% ln -s private/tmp tmp
% ln -s private/tmp tmp
Voilá, the system boots again!

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