Steve Sayeth Don't Disable That Apple Boot Graphic!

[kwoodrin]

I thought I would post a topic this evening about this problem since I encountered it today --just to give people a heads up on what I learned.

 

Basically, I was itching to do some hacking and I couldn't leave well enough alone. I was perusing the plist files in /library/preferences/systemconfiguration and came across the Boot Graphics key in the com.apple.Boot.plist file and thought that I would change it from Yes to No since it would be nice to see what is actually going on during boot.

 

I made several other changes (I do this every now and then try to tweak my Macway to perfection), finally I rebooted. Well the next hour and a half was spent trying to figure out why I could only get a blank blue screen upon boot up. No mouse -- nothing.

 

I manually fixed permissions on those plist files from the Darwin command prompt since not even Safe Boot would work. That did nothing to help.

 

Finally, I thought, there is no way that just turning off the boot graphic is causing this problem way further into the boot process, but I used nano at the Darwin command line and edited the com.apple.Boot.plist yet again and changed the Boot Graphics key back to Yes.

 

Viola! It worked. Why? Who knows, but it leads me to believe me that something critical is getting detected and set during the initialization of the boot graphics. I know that you said you have the boot graphic working, but you might try turning it off and watching the boot process to see what information you can derive about what the boot process is having trouble with initialization.

 

NOTE:

 

To boot into the Darwin command line and edit the com.apple.Boot.plist file, boot and press F8 then enter the -s parameter into the Darwin boot loader console. Once started enter

 

/sbin/fsck -y

/sbin/mount -uw /

 

Then you will have read write access to your hard drive. Then change to the library/preferences/systemconfiguration folder and run

 

nano com.apple.Boot.plist

 

the keyboard shortcuts for saving from within nano are marked at the bottom of the screen as soon as you start nano.

 

Hope this helps someone!

[erbic]

If you want to see what's going on during boot, add -v between <string></string> under <key>Kernel Flags</key> in com.apple.Boot.plist. That tells the OS to boot in verbose mode, which echoes to the screen everything happening during the boot process.

 

I'm not sure what Boot Graphics does, but it sounds like it might be initializing the graphics system or something. Obviously not something to mess around with.

[idividebyzero]

Im pretty sure you arent supposed to put "no", youre supposed to just delete yes and leave it blank like <string></string>. Saying No probably gave it an unknown command and froze it.

[kwoodrin]

Thanks guys. So. I am tempted to just delete the key and try again just to see what happens.

 

At any rate, I doesn't really make sense that putting no causes it to freeze as it is already well into the OS with the desktop (albeit, with no mouse, progress bar, and obviously no finder initialized) before it actually hangs.

 

I will try deleting the key just for my own peice of mind to know whether changing it from Yes causes it to hange or whether actually putting No in there causes it to hang. I'll post back with what I find.