Boot in safe mode to help diagnose problems

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Tue, Oct 8 2002 at 9:33AM PDT • Contributed by: Anonymous

10.2 has a safe boot feature, similar to Window's Safe Mode. It does the following:

It runs fsck on startup
It seems to LOAD a minimal set of Kernal Extensions
It seems to run a minimal set of startup scripts.
It does not launch your startup items

To access safe boot, hold the Shift key during startup. The Shift key should be held as soon as possible after the startup tone (but not before). You can let go as soon as you see then grey spinning cogs. When you are booting in safe boot, you will see "Safe Boot" on the Mac OS X startup screen.

[Editor's note: This was covered earlier this year in this hint, but the behavior has been improved in 10.2, so I felt it was worth mentioning again.]

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The following comments are owned by whomever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.

i was chagrin to discover that after safe boot, upon login, the login items lauched, rather than being squelched.

seems to me that safe boot should also stifle one's login items. alas, you will need to mash the shift key again when the desktop appears, and hold it down for a few seconds after the dock appears.

Just continue to hold down the shift key immediately after you log in.
Now, your login items should'nt launch.

Open Firmware Password
Authored by: thatch on Wed, Oct 9 2002 at 4:03AM PDT

This hint won't work if you have O.F. Password running, (the same is true if you go Single-User Mode by holding down command-s at boot). If you diable O.F. Password first by changing to no password and deselecting the always require password setting, it works fine except startup items will launch unless you hold down the shift key immediately after login as well.

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