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Tips: Mac OS X: Troubleshooting a Boot Failure

I had a major trouble after installing a system extension on my Mac OS X 10.4.7 installation last night. After configuring and installing the extension called Callisto Build 008, the Mac OS X failed to boot on restart.

The usual Apple screen showed up but after a while a nice error screen was presented demanding me to press the Power Button to shutdown the computer.


I was so frustrated fearing that I need to format and reinstall the OS from scratch without having backed up my work data.

I believe there must be a solution to this...that doesn't require me to reformat the hard drive. In Windows case, I can use the installation CD to access the hard drive and manually fix the problem. I'm expecting the same thing on Mac OS X -- to enter a command-line text interface and manually remove the offending system extension.

I went ahead browsing my favorite Insanely Mac forum and found an interesting thread as a starting point. Here's my actual procedure to fix the problem:


  1. Use F8 and enter boot option -v -s

  2. Text-mode command prompt will show up

  3. At root# prompt, enter /sbin/fsck -fy

  4. OS will check the boot disk, to make sure we're not working on a screwed up hard drive

  5. At root# prompt, enter /sbin/mount -uw / to mount the hard drive in read+write mode

  6. Then, cd /System/Library/Extensions
  7. The system extensions I just installed were Callisto.kext and CallistoHAL.kext, so I removed them by

    rm -rf Callisto.kext and
    rm -rf CallistoHAL.kext

  8. At the root# prompt, enter the command exit

  9. OSX will continue to boot and successfully enter the GUI mode



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