HELP! My Mac won’t start!
Posted by JohnnyAppleseed | Under Hardware, Review, Software Saturday May 3, 2008Unfortunately, it happens to many Mac owners. Usually it happens after you install some piece of software, or even a software update (even one from Apple itself). Sometimes it happens for no discernible reason. You (re)boot the system, and nothing happens. Or, the bootup stalls at the Apple logo, or maybe at a blue screen (yes, there is such a thing as a “blue screen of death” on a Mac, but it’s a solid blue screen with no text!). Or maybe you get as far as the login prompt, but it just keeps looping around and asking you for your login over and over, and you know you’re entering the correct name and password.
What do you do then? If you have access to another computer, you probably go online and look for a solution. But what if your only online access is the computer that’s now refusing to boot?
Well, you might be in slightly better shape if you have access to this little printed guide, called My Mac Won’t Start! A Tiny Guide. It prints out on a single page, which you can cut and fold according to the instructions, and tuck away somewhere. Take it with you when you’re on the road, or keep it in a safe place at home (maybe in the sleeve with the OS X DVD).
Now, having said that, before disaster happens you might want to read up on the Mac’s “Archive and Install” installation option. This is basically a complete re-installation of OS X from your DVD, but if you have recently switched from Windows you may think that’s a pretty drastic step. Well, it is, but not the way it would be if you were reinstalling Windows. If you are careful to select “Preserve User and Network Settings” during the archive and install process, you will probably be surprised to find that when the process completes (usually after a couple of hours, give or take a bit depending on the speed of your system), everything appears to work just as it did before you had the problem. Of course, that may not be true if you had a catastrophic failure (hard drive died, for example), but otherwise it may look like you never had a problem.
Don’t be fooled, things have changed “under the hood.” You should now have Internet access (assuming you have a working ‘net connection), so the very first thing you should do is click on the Apple icon in the upper left hand corner of your screen, click on “Software Update” and install all software updates. Surprisingly, even if it was an Apple software update that appeared to cause the problem, very often after an “Archive and Install” you can go right back and get the same software update and this time it will install without a problem. The next thing you need to check is whether any firewall settings you care about are the way you want them (they get set to the default settings), and then you may need to reinstall drivers for any external devices you use, such as printers (this is not universally true - if OS X supports the device natively you’ll likely be okay, but if you had to download and install a driver then it would be best to keep the driver install package in some safe location on one of your hard drives, so you can reinstall it if you need to). If you are using any antivirus software, check to make sure that it is operating okay - it may need to be reinstalled as well.
It probably won’t take you much more than an additional hour (after the Archive and Install) to have your system up and running again. There are a few things that don’t seem to be preserved. For example, if you installed Xcode (Developer Tools) from the OS X DVD, you will probably have to do that again. But anything you have installed in your user directory, or in the Mac’s Applications directory should be preserved, along with any software keys, etc. Of course, we can’t guarantee this will be true in every single instance of an “Archive and Install”, but we remember that any time we had to reinstall Windows it took days to get the system back to the way we had it, and invariably something never would work right again, whereas with the Mac we can be 99.5% functional within about three hours of starting the “Archive and Install” process.
There are some caveats to this: Archive and install won’t work if there’s not enough room to store your existing settings and data in a temporary folder (this doesn’t require as much space as you might think, because it’s not backing up the entire drive - the last time we did an Archive and Install on an 80 GB system drive, the resulting “Previous Systems” folder was a bit under 14 GB in size. Your experience might be different, but if you try to keep at least 20% of the primary drive space unused you will probably be okay), and there are a few other considerations as well. You really should read the two web pages of documentation on the Apple web site (#1 and #2). We strongly suggest that if you have never used this option, you take a few moments to read those pages now, and perhaps even print them out, so that you will have access to them when you cannot connect to the ‘net.
Archive and Install is not something to be used lightly, but if your system just won’t boot and the cause is not a catastrophic failure, Archive and Install is often the quickest way to get your system running again, particularly if you’re not a Unix guru. It’s not exactly a “quick fix” but on the other hand, it’s a lot quicker than pouring over obscure documentation or searching through web pages for hours, trying to find another way. Ultimately it’s up to you to decide whether you want to resort to an Archive and Install, bearing in mind that it probably will break a few things, but hopefully nothing you can’t fix with several minutes’ additional effort. Whatever you decide, we wish you good luck, and remind you that the best preventative step to avoid losing important data is a good backup (which Time Machine makes ridiculously easy, so if you are using Leopard you have no excuse!)
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