Boots only into Darwin login after 10.2.1 update |
September, 25, 2002 6:23 PM |
jonsaw |
My 7300 with an XLR8 325 mhz G3 processor board was working fine with XPostFacto and all versions of Mac OS up to 10.2, but after I installed the OS 10.2.1 update via the Software Update control panel, my OS X installation now boots only into Darwin, stopping at the Darwin login prompt. I reinstalled the XPostFacto extensions and BootX, but that didn't help. Any ideas how to get my Mac to boot into OS X again? |
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RE: Boots only into Darwin login after 10.2.1 upda |
September, 28, 2002 4:34 AM |
jonsaw |
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Well, I'm finally running under OS 10.2.1. I ran the 10.2 installer again, on top of my existing installation, having it do an Archive & Install/import, and that installation booted without the command line login prompt appearing, so then I installed the 10.2.1 update, this time using a standalone installer instead of the Software Update control panel. That worked, except my Palm OS 4.0 software isn't launching its Transport Monitor, so I'll just reinstall Palm 4.0. I'm at least as suspicious of the reliability of the Software Update control panel itself for some OS updates as I am of a conflict between the pre-release 10.2.1 updater I used a couple weeks ago and the release version, via Software Update, that I ran on top of that a few days ago. Thanks again for your help. I'll be staying away from any pre-release/ developer versions of OS X system software now, so there's another lesson learned. |
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RE: Boots only into Darwin login after 10.2.1 upda |
September, 28, 2002 2:29 AM |
avit |
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Sorry to hear that you couldn't get it going... You have to be mindful of those developer releases. They put them out for other programmers' convenience, but nothing is set in stone and it can't be guaranteed that the beta will mesh perfectly with the final release version. I assume it's expected that you'd only keep the installation on a testing machine which can be wiped clean when the final version comes along. (I'll admit that I once produced documents in a beta version of an application only to be informed by the final release version that they are unreadable... I was pissed off, but what can you do... You can't tie the programmers' hands while the project is still in progress--they do need to change stuff as it develops!) |
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RE: Boots only into Darwin login after 10.2.1 upda |
September, 27, 2002 9:07 PM |
jonsaw |
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Egad! Nope, I didn't know that Apple doesn't support upgrading OS X after you install a developer pre-release--that seems odd: what are developers (I'm not one) supposed to do with the OS X pre-release updates from Apple, if, once they install them, their installation of OS X can't be further updated using release versions of updates? Can they update only with further developer pre-releases, so that they can never again install (at least into that OS X installation) any of the public release versions, making the Software Update control panel useless to developers? Thanks for the info, Ryan and avit/Andrew. I've been handling this problem up till now, using my usual first approach, which is to research a problem and try different things, short of a complete reinstall, in the hope that I'll learn something. Well, I've learned a lot from you guys, but now it's time to try my other approach, which is to finally give in and do whatever it takes to simply fix the problem in the least amount of time. I thought that anything short of a reinstall would be less time-consuming, but that hasn't turned out to be the case. I'm grateful now that I've had a reason to learn some terminal commands, it's put me on the road to learning more of them. Till now, I haven't needed them. |
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: Boots only into Darwin login after 10.2.1 update |
September, 27, 2002 6:38 PM |
OSXGuru |
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Here are a few notes that might help. I tried the niutil -read . /users/ryan on my machine, running 10.2.1, and I don't get an authentication_authority property. AuthorizationRef is the name of a structure in the Authorization framework. LoginAuthRefMgr is probably a structure internal to loginwindow.app. As you probably know, Apple doesn't support upgrading after you install a developer pre-release. Sometimes it works, but sometimes there can be odd problems (like this one). It may be worth doing a clean install (or archive and install) of 10.2 and then upgrading to 10.2.1. Of course, that would be time-consuming. |
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RE: Boots only into Darwin login after 10.2.1 upda |
September, 27, 2002 4:04 PM |
jonsaw |
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I think we're getting closer--your speculations ARE pretty good!--and your recollection as to the syntax for niutil was correct, but altering the "authentication_authority" line didn't work. First I tried sudo niutil -destroyval . /users/johnsawyer authentication_authority 0 ...and restarted the Mac, but still got the login prompt. I checked NetInfo, and it still listed the line "authentication_authority: ; basic;", with the space, so next I tried sudo niutil -destroyprop . /users/johnsawyer authentication_authority ...and restarted, but still got the login prompt. I checked NetInfo again, and this time the line regarding authentication_authority was gone, as expected. After doing this, I wanted to look into your question as to whether the "authentication_authority" line was something new to OS 10.2. I found I had a 600 mhz iMac in the shop (I fix Macs) that had OS 10.0.3 installed, so I checked its NetInfo, and the listing was somewhat similar to mine, but with the major difference being no reference to "authentication_authority". I updated this Mac's OS to 10.1.5, and NetInfo's listing became more similar to OS 10.2's, but still no line regarding "authentication_authority". I didn't want to update this Mac's OS all the way to 10.2, since Apple wants you to pay for it, and the client, though he'll be happy I did the 10.1.5 update, isn't expecting to pay for a 10.2 update. Arrgh, as they say. I'm tempted to just reinstall OS 10.2 on my Mac, but I decided to use this problem as a way to learn something extra about OS 10, so I'll hold off on doing a reinstallation for the time being. If you have any more suggestions, I'd be happy to try them! Maybe we'll get to the bottom of something that will be generically useful in similar situations. |
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RE: Boots only into Darwin login after 10.2.1 upda |
September, 26, 2002 4:15 PM |
avit |
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John, I think you found your error in NetInfo... (Not sure though, this might be premature, but give it a shot. So far my speculations have been pretty good, right? :-) ) Your authentication_authority seems to have two entries, one of which is "basic" and one which is empty. I'm not sure if you even need an authentication_authority property for your user, I don't recall if all users have this or not. Perhaps someone else can confirm if this can just be deleted. You could probably quite safely remove the empty (null) entry that is there, leaving it just "basic". Unfortunately I'm having OSX problems of my own right now and I don't have access to verify the exact command you would need to use to remove that empty value. Type niutil all by itself and it will list the functions you can do with it and the parameters for each one. I think it goes something like this: sudo niutil -destroyval . /users/johnsawyer authentication_authority 0 When referring to niutil's help page: . is your domain, /users/johnsawyer is your path authentication_authority is the propkey 0 is the index of the value you want to kill I'm not sure if the command asks for more than that. Please check. Alternatively, you could just try: sudo niutil -destroyprop . /users/johnsawyer authentication_authority To take out the whole authentication_authority line. I don't recall it from when I was mucking around in NetInfo, but it might be a new thing for 10.2. Even if you can it, it should be easy to recreate. Good luck! --Andrew |
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RE: Boots only into Darwin login after 10.2.1 upda |
September, 26, 2002 1:44 PM |
jonsaw |
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Sorry, more dropped Return chars in last msg. Seems the forum software throws out single Return chars, but doesn't drop two Returns in a row. |
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RE: Boots only into Darwin login after 10.2.1 upda |
September, 26, 2002 1:40 PM |
jonsaw |
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Thanks for the help, even though it's still a mystery. However, thanks to you, I can now reboot properly from the command line--a real timesaver. It appears NetInfo (Directory Services) is running (at least as far as I can tell), since niutil shows this: name: johnsawyer home: /Users/johnsawyer hint: authentication_authority: ; basic; [this is the only thing that looks odd to me-- there's just a space before the first semicolon prior to the word "basic", and this line refers to authentication--could this be the null that the systemlog refers to?] gid: 20 shell: /bin/tcsh uid: 501 realname: John Sawyer sharedDir: Public picture: /Library/User Pictures/ passwd: [scrambled] _writers_passwd: johnsawyer _writers_tim_password: johnsawyer _writers_hint: johnsawyer _shadow_passwd: johnsawyer _writers_picture: johnsawyer |
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RE: Boots only into Darwin login after 10.2.1 upda |
September, 26, 2002 4:23 AM |
avit |
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It's not the plist file. It's something else, but I don't know what. |
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RE: Boots only into Darwin login after 10.2.1 upda |
September, 26, 2002 4:21 AM |
avit |
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To restart: sudo shutdown -r now ...and provide your admin password. The reboot command should also work when run through sudo: sudo reboot I don't really know what to make of those logs, unfortunately. I believe that the LoginAuthRefMgr and AuthorizationRef are reported errors from within the loginwindow code, and not files on your hard disk that you can edit. The question now becomes, why doesn't your loginwindow have the authorization it needs to run? More stabs in the dark: Is NetInfo (DirectoryServices?) running? Try: niutil -read . /users/john This should give you "john"s user information if NetInfo is running (passwd is shown scrambled there, don't worry). The blue screen that you see for 10 seconds after you "exit" is the WindowServer starting and trying to launch loginwindow, which obviously fails because you end up at the console again. You'll see that at the end of the log. tail /var/log/system.log In case it shows something more insightful than at startup. Sorry, that's all I have... |
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: Boots only into Darwin login after 10.2.1 update |
September, 26, 2002 3:54 AM |
jonsaw |
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Well, that didn't work either. In any case, it shows that my user name is in the plist file. |
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: Boots only into Darwin login after 10.2.1 update |
September, 26, 2002 3:52 AM |
jonsaw |
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Hmm. The forum software stripped some Return characters from my last message, mostly in the system.log listing. The forum software also doesn't have an option to delete a message to allow me to replace it with a fixed one, so please let me know if anything is unclear. Here's a second try at posting my com.apple.loginwindow.plist file: ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"? !DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http:// www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd" plist version="1.0" dict key>RetriesUntilHint3autoLoginUserjohnsawyerlastUserRestartlastUserNamejohnsawyerlastUserUID501 |
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RE: Boots only into Darwin login after 10.2.1 upda |
September, 26, 2002 3:19 AM |
jonsaw |
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Thanks very much for the suggestions. When I said I tried single user mode, I meant I tried it after verbose mode, just to see what would happen; the descriptions I give in my prior messages are all while in verbose mode. I should also mention that, about two weeks prior to installing the 10.2.1 update via Software Update, I had installed a developer pre-release of the 10.2.1 update, with a different build number; I wonder if that has anything to do with the problem I'm having. This time, I put everything back in its original place, then booted from the OS 10.2 installer CD (using XPF), and ran Disk Utility's "Repair Permissions" option. It found a few permissions to repair, but that didn't help. As you suggested, I also removed the file /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist, but this didn't work. I looked at system.log, as you suggested, and found that SystemStarter seems to be happy, but references to LoginWindow aren't: Sep 25 22:36:47 John-Sawyers-Computer syslogd: restart ... Sep 25 22:36:52 John-Sawyers-Computer root: setting hostname to 12-232-200-150.client.attbi.com [don't know how relevant this is, but I include it here just in case it is] ... Sep 25 22:36:57 John-Sawyers-Computer ConsoleMessage: Starting Core Services Sep 25 22:36:57 John-Sawyers-Computer ConsoleMessage: Starting network file system Sep 25 22:36:57 John-Sawyers-Computer SystemStarter: Starting Core Services Sep 25 22:36:57 John-Sawyers-Computer SystemStarter: Starting network file system [all messages seem OK, when I compare them to previous successful boots as listed in system.log] ... Sep 25 22:37:00 John-Sawyers-Computer SystemStarter: Startup complete. ... [here's where the trouble seems to begin:] /System/Library/CoreServices/loginwindow.app/Contents/MacOS/loginwindo w: session setup failed (status = -2147417886) Sep 25 22:37:03 John-Sawyers-Computer configd[98]: executing /usr/sbin/DirectoryService Sep 25 22:37:06 John-Sawyers-Computer loginwindow[365]: Could not allocate LoginAuthRefMgr instance. Sep 25 22:37:06 John-Sawyers-Computer loginwindow[365]: AuthorizationRef doesn't have a username ((null)). Sep 25 22:37:06 John-Sawyers-Computer loginwindow[365]: exiting to console Sep 25 22:37:06 John-Sawyers-Computer WindowServer[364]: loginwindow connection closed; closing server. ...and then the Darwin login prompt appears. I found no file named "AuthorizationRef", but there's a file at System/Library/CoreServices/AuthorizationTrampoline; I removed this file temporarily, but that didn't help. It's full of a lot of non-text characters--I have no idea what it contains. There's also a file at usr/libexec/authopen, with a modified date and time at about the time I installed the 10.2.1 update, so maybe something went wrong with this file, but I don't think I can simply trash it, since, like the AuthorizationTrampoline file, it contains a lot of non-text characters, and so it appears to be more than a simple preferences list, etc. There's also a file at private/etc/authorization, but its modified date was about two months ago, so it hasn't changed. No other files with the string "auth" in them seem to be candidates either, at least based on their modified dates. I also took a look at the contents of my com.apple.loginwindow.plist file: RetriesUntilHint 3 autoLoginUser johnsawyer lastUser Restart lastUserName johnsawyer lastUserUID 501 Also, is there a command, at the command prompt, that will restart the Mac? I tried "restart", but that didn't work, and "reboot", but got a message saying "operation not permitted". As it is, when the login prompt appears, I have to do a forced restart from the keyboard, causing my OS 9 to take a lot of time to reboot due to startup diagnostics. Sorry to go on at such length, but I wanted to supply as much info as seems relevant. Any more help you can provide would be greatly appreciated. |
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RE: Boots only into Darwin login after 10.2.1 upda |
September, 25, 2002 11:29 PM |
avit |
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OK, that doesn't sound like Single-User mode to me, especially since you can log in using your regular account. I haven't got a clue what this could be. Try logging in and type: more /var/log/system.log ...to see what's loaded and what's going on. See if SystemStarter is in there and your StartupItems loaded or not. See if there is anything pertaining to LoginWindow. I'm wondering if something is preventing the LoginWindow from loading and thus you are presented with the text console instead. Another idea might be to delete /Library/Preferences/com.apple.LoginWindow.plist It might be a corrupt prefs file. (I think that's what the file is called, please double check). |
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RE: Boots only into Darwin login after 10.2.1 upda |
September, 25, 2002 11:11 PM |
jonsaw |
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When the problem first started, XPF was set to verbose mode; when the login prompt appeared (the line before it displayed "Darwin/BSD (12-232-200-150.client.attbi.com) (console)"), I logged in, then entered "exit", but the login prompt appeared again after about 10 seconds of blue screen. I tried single user mode, but that didn't help. I also tried removing some items from System/Library (Caches folder, some startup items, and the whole Preferences folder), and some items from Hard Drive: Library (Caches and Preferences folders), as well as my entire home folder in the Users folder. Nothing has helped, but then again I'm basically working blind from the skimpiest knowledge of this level of detail. |
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RE: Boots only into Darwin login after 10.2.1 upda |
September, 25, 2002 6:44 PM |
avit |
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Check that you have not turned on the "Single-User" option in XPostFacto. If it's turned on, the system will boot to a command line where only the root user is available, for maintenance. Try typing "exit" when it boots into Darwin and see what happens. |
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