Installed wrong kernel

[ericrcan]

I installed Universal Installer (guessing wrong kernal), and now it wont start...

 

To make a long story short, I now can't get past the "Starting Mac OS X..." screen. The blue loading bar takes much longer that it normally does, and then it just never boots into OS X, simply staying on the "Starting Mac OS X..." screen. I've tried booting with -x for safe mode, but it does the same thing. Does anybody have any suggestions? I've got a lot of important documents on the partition that I haven't backed up, and I'd really like to get back to OS X. Can I just install the zeph dvd graphic driveR? and how?

[Beerkex'd]

What do you mean by universal installer? In the mac world, Universal means software that's compiled to work on both PPC and Intel CPUs. In the hackintosh world, a Universal Kernel is one that will work on both AMD and Intel CPUs.

 

You can try starting the system with your old kernel.

 

Type this at the boot prompt:

 

/mach_kernel.bak -f -v

 

(of course if your old kernel isn't named mach_kernel.bak you'll have to find out what it's called)

 

If you can't get it to work, you can take the harddrive out and plug it into another mac or a Windows PC with macdrive/transmac installed. Then you can recover your data.

[ericrcan]

i dont have another computer with mac on it, im just on my schools computer. i installed Natit universal and thats what messed it up

[Beerkex'd]

I don't know what natit universal is. I'm guessing it's a graphics injector and not a kernel installer.

 

You can try booting with -x. If that gets you into the finder, you should be able to undo what you did.

 

Here's an extensive list of boot flags:

http://apple2pc.blogspot.com/2008/02/darwi...ot-options.html

 

And if you can't get into the finder, here's how to boot into safe mode and delete it from there:

http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=41603