Last night at about 9 pm Camino Crashed… and the whole house came down with it.
Camino had been asking me to update it for several days. I was running at 2.0.0.6 and it wanted to update to version 2.0.0.7. Well, this crash, lead another app to crash, very unusual, considering the isolating nature of apps on OS X (I am running OS X 10.6.5). So I decided to reboot the OS. This lead to OS X booting and getting to the sequence of initializing the mouse, the cursor could be seen. However, instead of proceeding the screen would switch between blue and a lighter blue (this is the blue after the gray screen in the OX boot sequence). Not cool. So I reset the pram.

Hold down ⌘+⌥+P+R during start-up and wait till the second chime is heard. Then let go.

Still no progress. So I booted up in safe mode and went to disk utility to repair permissions. This is where I found out that several of the OS X language packs and Java had permission errors. So I repaired those permissions. Still no joy.

So I looked for an alternative and found out about booting OS X in single user mode.

Hold down ⌘+S during start-up.

Then I followed the instructions on running FSCK. I tried this several times and had no joy.

So I then tried to boot to Target disk mode.

Hold down the T key during boot.

It booted to target disk mode. But then would not appear as an external disk on any Mac I plugged it into. I tried three different Macs.

The I tried to boot from a retail OS X Snow Leopard install CD/DVD.

Hold down the C key during boot.

Can not see the disk.

Then I tried to select the boot disk by booting to an option menu.

Hold down the ⌥ key during boot.

I can see the Install disk in the options but I select the option and the machine freezes.

I then called Apple Care. I got on Skype and called the 1-800 Apple Care number from Mexico. And told them the problem and then told them what I had done and asked if an archive and install but reinstalling OS X 10.5 and then up grading to 10.6 would work. They said that was not the recommended way but might be a possibility. I asked them if there was anything more that I could do. They said, no you have tried everything that we would have suggested over the phone. Knowing what you know you might have worked for Apple before. They then asked me if I wanted to schedule an appointment with a genius. I replied that I was in Mexico and I would not be back in the States for another month.

So I decided to try and get a Time Machine copy of my hard drive and repair the hard drive. No luck, Time Machine stops with a corrupted file. Then I decided to use Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the drive and fix the cloned drive. I get to a corrupt file and it stops too. But at least it says that the file /Applications/Camino.app/Contents/MacOS/libssl3.dylib was corrupt. Someone else has had this problem too. I downloaded and reinstalled the current version of Camino. I reboot and it gets past the Blue and Gray screen to the login options. I log in an it starts the startup items but then kicks me out to the login screen again. Better but no fix.

I am still struggling with this. I found this on the Apple forums and have cleared the Cashe folder indicated and have removed everything from the startup menu. Still no joy. This was in response to the following thread on Apple’s forums: After 10.6.5 cannot login or boot from DVD or clone .

A friend loaned me a USB hardrive and installed OS X to the harddrive, and made it a bootable disk. It boots just fine. So it does not appear to be a hardware issue. However, when I tried to use migration assistant to pull my files over to the external drive, but migration assistant didn’t make progress after about 10 hours.

We have yet to see what the solution will be… I also am looking at MySQLCOM. So it appears that some start up items’ permissions got mixed up. This post explains how to reset the permissions to root.

I got my computer working again by re-installing OS X 10.6.5 Combo installer. And resting the permissions for the Startup Items via the terminal.