Boot Snow Leopard from Thumb Drive in Single User Mode on Macbook Air

I'm trying to boot from a thumb drive that I transferred the Snow Leopard .dmg on. My macbook air only lets me get into single user mode. Every time I try to boot or enter safe mode or regular mode, the Macbook Air shuts down.

I do have the installation media on my usb flash drive. I'm sure it's leopard, and the problem is that I cannot get passed the apple logo on boot. The laptop turns off after trying to finish the boot for twenty seconds. However, I can get into single user mode. I just can't seem to install the media in single user mode due to my lack of know how.

Similar Messages

  • Unable to Access Single User Mode on Macbook Air 2012

    I am unable to enter SINGLE USER mode on myMacbook Air 2012....I have made sure that there is no Firmware Password preventing me from doing so...what else
    could be the reason....any suggestions?

    So are you saying you try to start up as shown here:
    OS X Mountain Lion: Start up in single-user mode
    If so, what happens when you try?  What do you see?

  • Can't boot snow leopard from external drive

    I have a copy of snow leopard installed on a separate usb hard drive which I use to run some PowerPC programmes under rosetta. I can attach this USB drive to my Mac Pro and also to an Intel Macbook and choose to start up on this external drive without any issues. However when I try restarting my new 2011 iMac on this external usb drive the machine crashes every time with a kernal panic. Is this problem unique to me or does everyone else have this issue with new iMacs. Mine is a 27" 3.4ghz i& with 12ghb ram installed running 10.72. Is their soemthing I can do to resolve this problem?

    I have now solved the problem of being able to boot from either Snow Leopard or Lion on a new Mid 2011 iMac. This is how I did it.
    1. Attach an external USB drive to an earlier Mac or borrow one from a friend. In my case I used my 2009 Unibody Macbook (which has Lion installed on it but does allow you to install Snow Leopard on an attached device) Put the Snow Leopard install disc in this machine and tell it to install Snow Leopard on your attached USB Drive.
    2. Start up the Macbook (or whatever machine you are using) and get it to restart on the attached USB drive so that it boots up in Snow Leopard. Then when Snow Leopard is up and running on the attached external drive, do a software update to bring it up to 10.68 (the current version). This step is important as I found that if I plugged in the external USB drive into the iMac with only operating system 10.6 installed it would cause a kernal panic on start up when I choose to start up on the external USB drive.
    3. With Snow Leopard updated to system 10.68 you can now plug it into your iMac and restart the iMac booting into Snow Leopard from the external USB drive. You do this by either going to System Preferences>Startup disk and choosing the external drive, or by holding down the option key when you restart your Mac and choosing the external USB drive.
    4. The next step is to make your iMac dual boot now that you know it can run Snow Leopard successfully from an external USB drive. To do this, go into Utilities>Disk Utility and select your main drive. Select the main disk (with Lion on it)  and then choose Partition and choose 2 Partitions. Drag the first partition bundary line down to make the second partition size as small as possible. In my case I had a stock 1TB drive and the smallest partition size it would allow me was 70gb. Create the second partition (assuming you have spare space on your drive to allow this to happen). This will then create a second hard drive icon on your desktop. I renamed mine "Snow Leopard startup".
    5. Download the free (and excellent) utility Carbon Copy Cloner and use it to copy your Snow Leopard operating sytem from your attached USB external drive to your new partition.
    6. That's it! Now you can choose to start up your iMac from either Lion or Snow Leopard using either method mentioned in 3 above.
    7. As a final step I suggest your install your Rosetta only programmes in your new Snow Leopard partition so that you can access them easily and keep them all together.

  • Can't boot Snow Leopard from USB drive made in Yosemite

    Hi all,
    I have a brand new macbook pro running Yosemite, but some of the software I have will only run in Snow Leopard.
    Running Snow Leopard as a Virtual Machine has been clunky, so I wanted to try an alternative and install Snow Leopard onto an external HD and work from that.
    I got hold of the Snow Leopard dmg file and created a bootable USB thumb drive (I did this within Yosemite) to try to install it onto the external HD. I used the instructions here:
    http://www.maciverse.com/installing-snow-leopard-onto-an-external-hard-drive.htm l
    But when I restart the computer and try and boot from the USB drive, I just get the grey background with dark grey apple symbol, indefinitely. The installation process never commences.
    What am I not doing right?
    Thanks in advance for any insights.

    You can only do what you are trying from a model that can be booted into Snow Leopard. You have a 2014 model that can only be booted by Mavericks or Yosemite. You cannot run Snow Leopard on your machine except in a VM or a Mac from 2010 or earlier.

  • Mounting a usb hard drive in single user mode

    I've gotten as far as connecting the hard drive at boot, but I don't know how to figure out which dev is the hard drive, and which arguments to use with the mount command. I can't do much when I login, and I'm trying to cp files from my hard drive to my external hard drive through single user mode.
    Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

    Hi leung wai,
       I wouldn't mind knowing the answer myself. I think the problem with doing it in the manner you attempted is that the device tree hasn't been created yet so the mount command is certainly not going to work. I assume that the answer is to start up enough of the system to have the device tree created. Unfortunately, I don't know where in the startup process that occurs. You could try the following command after making the boot volume writable:
    /usr/libexec/registermach_bootstrapservers /etc/mach_init.d
    Then check to see if the /dev virtual filesystem has been created. Of course it wouldn't surprise me if that didn't also mount your disks. If not, try the following:
    /sbin/SystemStarter
    It should have been created after that because at that point almost the whole system has started.
    Gary
    ~~~~
       You've been telling me to relax all the way here, and
       now you're telling me just to be myself?
             -- The Return of the Secaucus Seven

  • Mount an external hard drive in single user mode

    Do any know how to mount an external hard drive in single user mode:
    I've issue the following command:
    /sbin/mount -uw /
    mkdir /Volumes/ex1
    /sbin/mount_hfs /dev/disk2s3 /Volumes/ex1
    (I've checked my external hard drive using df -k showing the device is disk2s3)
    Result:
    Permission denied

    Hi leung wai,
       I wouldn't mind knowing the answer myself. I think the problem with doing it in the manner you attempted is that the device tree hasn't been created yet so the mount command is certainly not going to work. I assume that the answer is to start up enough of the system to have the device tree created. Unfortunately, I don't know where in the startup process that occurs. You could try the following command after making the boot volume writable:
    /usr/libexec/registermach_bootstrapservers /etc/mach_init.d
    Then check to see if the /dev virtual filesystem has been created. Of course it wouldn't surprise me if that didn't also mount your disks. If not, try the following:
    /sbin/SystemStarter
    It should have been created after that because at that point almost the whole system has started.
    Gary
    ~~~~
       You've been telling me to relax all the way here, and
       now you're telling me just to be myself?
             -- The Return of the Secaucus Seven

  • Mount external Hard drive in Single user mode

    Do any know how to mount an external hard drive in single user mode:
    I've issue the following command:
    /sbin/mount -uw /
    mkdir /Volumes/ex1
    /sbin/mount_hfs /dev/disk2s3 /Volumes/ex1
    (I've checked my external hard drive using df -k showing the device is disk2s3)
    Result:
    Permission denied

    I seem to remember the "Permission denied" or "Device busy" coming up in some situations but not others when attempting to mount drives at this early stage in "single user" mode...
    It might be worth trying to run:<pre>sh /etc/rc</pre>This is actually present among the "Tiger" messages in "Single User" mode, as the procedure to continue booting but remaining in "single user" mode. Indeed, it seems to start up the usual "services" like starting disk arbitration (so you can eg. use 'diskutil' to repair permissions, or loading "NetInfo" so you don't need to work in '-raw' mode - in the past, people had posted complicated procedures for doing these things manually.
    After running the 'rc' script, try creating your mount point and and running 'mount_hfs' as usual...

  • Macbook does not boot. stuck at grey screen. have tried single user mode, but text stops at AppleIntelCPUPPowerManagement: initialization complete, without anymore prompts. no

    macbook does not boot. stuck at grey screen. have tried single user mode, but text stops at AppleIntelCPUPPowerManagement: initialization complete, without anymore prompts. no hash key appears that will allow me to type in: fsck -fy
    have my trials for IB in one week and my history notes are all on my hard drive, that has not been backed up. help please =(

    macbook does not boot. stuck at grey screen. have tried single user mode, but text stops at AppleIntelCPUPPowerManagement: initialization complete, without anymore prompts. no hash key appears that will allow me to type in: fsck -fy
    have my trials for IB in one week and my history notes are all on my hard drive, that has not been backed up. help please =(

  • Install Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard from USB Drive

    My MacBook Pro (Late 2006 15.4-inch 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo) has a SuperDrive that does not work.
    I wish to re-install Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, as this is the latest DVD I possess, to wipe the HDD prior to selling.  It has Lion installed but this was done via the Mac App store and I don't want to sell with any links to my account or as an authorised computer.
    How do I boot the MacBook Pro from a USB stick, wipe the HDD and install Snow Leopard?

    You will still need a Mac and a optical drive, a external one will do. To read the disk to put it on a USB, external opticals are not bootable.
    http://www.maciverse.com/install-os-x-snow-leopard-from-usb-flash-drive.html
    Here is how to remove data off the machine (hold on, extermely paranoid )
    How do I securely delete data from the machine?

  • Yosemite on internal HD and boot Snow Leopard from external HD clone

    Hey Everyone,
    I recently cloned my Snow Leopard 10.6.8 internal HD to an external FW800 HD which I can boot off. I have backup of everything, both Time Machine and straight backups.
    I am thinking of upgrading to Yosemite and am wondering will I still be able to boot into Snow Leopard from the Clone?
    I had heard somewhere that Yosemite makes some changes to the logic board which makes it troublesome but I am not up to scratch on this stuff.
    My System is an iMac 2011, identifier 12,1 with 2.5GHz i5 and 4Gb Ram(soon to be upgraded to 16Gb)
    Many thanks in advance
    J

    Hello. I have a similar question. I recently purchased a new iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2013, 3.1 GHz Intel Core i7, 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3) running OS X 10.10.2 Yosemite.
    My issue: I have an external drive that I partitioned into two partitions, one is for all my music, pictures and videos. The other partition drive is Snow Leopard 10.6.3.
    On my old iMAc (still set up and using it) which is a 2007 machine and running Mt. Lion, I was able to select which drive to start from, between Snow Leopard and Mt. Lion.
    This allowed me to keep playing Sid Meier's Civilization III (the last version where you can build a palace).
    Anyway, on the new iMac, when I choose the Snow Leopard disk as startup, and it reboots, I get a gray screen with the apple on it, and nothing happens.
    Is there something else I need to do? Any idea why this does not work as easily as it did on the old machine?
    Thanks.

  • How to Restore from Time Machine in Single-user mode?

    Hi there, I am trying to fix a Macbook Pro that has had its /private folder trashed and emptied. Obviously it won't boot unless you you boot in to Single User mode and I'm wondering if its possible to do a Time Machine restore from the terminal, I would need the 2nd more recent Time Machine image which is sitting on a Firewire HDD.
    I was going to just see if I could find the orignal OSX install disk and just do a fresh install of the OS which I don't mind doing (since everything important is backed up in Dropbox), but I can't seem to find the CD anywhere nearby, so the Time Machine option would be much preferred.
    Any help would be greatly appreciated.

    Not sure if this is related enough, but I just wrestled trying to restore from time machine too, trying to reinstall 10.5.8 after putting a new HD in my MBP, 2006 vintage.
    That took sooooo long to get back to where I was before swapping disks; what did the trick was ordering a free copy of Snow Leopard install disk (free due to Apple trying to push people from idisk to icloud) which was rushed FedEx (yay) and which allowed me to access Time Machine where my ancient original OSX install disk had not.
    And all it took was 2 weeks of cursing!

  • How do i repair my hard drive in single user mode when disk is full?

    Hi there Apple Community!
    I have an old Macbook Pro 17" with an upgraded 500GB harddrive and 4GB memory. I'm running Mac OSX Lion.
    Was hoping you could help me out.  THis is the situation:
    Long story short I spilt wine on my macbook and the screen went a bit blobby. Switched it off for a few days, removed the battery etc. etc. Opened it up cleaned out as much of the wine as possible, but unfortunately some of it came in behind the LCD, so now the screen has a nice red stain.  Obviously I'm not going to try to clean that out of the LCD. 
    My Macbook Pro still worked for a few days after that, but then my harddrive gave up.  I booted in the Recovery HD menu, verified the drive and I got the error "Keys out of order - This disk needs to be repaired, click Repair Disk." I attempted to repair the disk but got the error "Keys out of order - Disk Full Error - The volume could not be repaired".
    Unfortnately of this 500GB I only have about 7GB free on it, as I have a huge iPhoto and iTunes library. I did make a TIme Machine backup of my user directory, but not the system files.  I don't really want to do a clean install because:
    1) I'm paranoid that there's something I did not fully back up
    2) I don't want to have to download the whole Mac OSX Lion again. I should have made a USB bootable backup when I had the chance.  I don't have access to a broadband connection.
    What I feel are my viable options, are as follows:
    1) I did buy a replacement internal 500GB harddrive, so I can probably try to make an image of the hard drive to this new drive, but not sure how. I believe it's through the Disk Utility with the "New Image" option but not sure how to go from there.
    2) Start up in Single User Mode and delete some unnecessary files and re-attempt to run the fschk -fy utility again (I tried this earlier and got the same Disk Full Error).  - the problem with this is, I'm not familiar with the command line and have no clue how to delete files.  I don't know my way around Unix.
    3) I can also probably attempt to make a Ghost Image or Acronis Image of the failed drive to this new drive, but not sure if Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image will be able to read this HFS drive - I believe it's possible as it's a simple hard drive clone. 
    If you can guide me in the best option - probably there is a better solution than my proposed ones above, I appreciate any feedback and comments you might have!

    hi Baltwo,
    So I ended up copying my user folder to another harddrive. I managed to download the whole osx lion again, reinstalled, and recovered my home folder using this discussion:
    http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1428
    I have managed to get all my files back. My iTunes library works fine, but my iPhoto library when I open it, get the following error:
    iPhoto cannot be opened because of a problem.
    Here's the error log
    Process:         iPhoto [1540]
    Path:            /Applications/iPhoto.app/Contents/MacOS/iPhoto
    Identifier:      com.apple.iPhoto
    Version:         8.1.2 (8.1.2)
    Build Info:      iPhotoProject-4240000~8
    Code Type:       X86 (Native)
    Parent Process:  launchd [209]
    Date/Time:       2012-09-19 19:56:45.528 +0200
    OS Version:      Mac OS X 10.7.4 (11E53)
    Report Version:  9
    Sleep/Wake UUID: 7948ABE2-5294-4F87-B6E3-777095A2F2EE
    Interval Since Last Report:          4780 sec
    Crashes Since Last Report:           9
    Per-App Crashes Since Last Report:   9
    Anonymous UUID:                      70117D38-03EA-4F9C-B810-50B743864B9E
    Crashed Thread:  0
    Exception Type:  EXC_BREAKPOINT (SIGTRAP)
    Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000002, 0x0000000000000000
    Application Specific Information:
    dyld: launch, loading dependent libraries
    Dyld Error Message:
      Library not loaded: /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/iLifeSlideshow.framework/Versions/A/iLifeSlid eshow
      Referenced from: /Applications/iPhoto.app/Contents/MacOS/iPhoto
      Reason: image not found
    I've done an Apple Software Update but it didn't find an update for iPhoto.
    One thing to note is, this library was originally created on iLife 08, upgraded to '09 and it stayed on that version. It hasn't een upgraded to iLife '11.  It worked fine on my previous install of OSX Lion.  How do I recover the library without upgrading to '11 ?

  • Mounting external drives in single-user mode?

    Sigh. What were the odds of the HD on my month-old MacBook Pro and the HD on my somewhat older one (which was filling in for the moment as a backup) failing on the same night? Pretty low, I'm guessing, but that's what has happened. The Genius Bar has confirmed that the new drive is completely toast, and Apple is replacing it now, but of course they can't salvage the data. As for the old drive, while it won't boot and isn't visible to other machines in target disk mode, I am able to mount it in single-user mode and even view text files. What I can't seem to do is mount my external FireWire/USB2 drive so that I can try actually copying the files off.
    I've re-read the man page for "mount" in hopes of discovering the correct incantation, but so far it has eluded me. I've been trying things like "/sbin/mount -w /dev/disk1 /Volumes" and "/sbin/mount -w /dev/disk1 /Volumes/rescue", which return "Permission denied" and "No such file or directory" respectively...not sure that's the right device, but finding an acceptable mount point seems to be an issue regardless. Hoping someone can point me in the right direction, and thanks for reading.

    Thanks, macbig...no joy yet, but definitely a helpful link.
    I've confirmed via System Profiler on laptop #3 that my external USB drive is formatted as MS-DOS FAT32, so mount_msdos seems like the right utility to use. (The drive shows up there as /dev/disk1s1.) Meanwhile, "ls /dev/disk*" on the problem machine returns the following:
    /dev/disk0 /dev/disk0s1 /dev/disk0s2 /dev/disk1 /dev/disk1s1 /dev/disk1s2 /dev/disk1s3 /dev/disk2 /dev/disk2s1
    I've created /Volumes/rescue as a mount point and tried most of those devices with "/sbin/mount_msdos [device] /Volumes/rescue", with the following results:
    /dev/disk1:
    mount_msdos: Unsupported sector size (0)
    /dev/disk1s1:
    mount_msdos: Unsupported sector size (1)
    /dev/disk1s2:
    mount_msdos: /dev/disk1s2: Bad file descriptor
    /dev/disk1s3:
    mount_msdos: Unsupported sector size (0)
    /dev/disk2:
    mount_msdos: Unsupported sector size (64543)
    /dev/disk2s1:
    kextload: cannot resolve dependencies for kernel extension /System/Library/Extensions/msdosfs.kext
    error loading extension /System/Library/Extensions/msdosfs.kext
    mount_msdos: msdos filesystem is not available
    Based on this, I'm guessing that disk2s1 is the device I want. Unfortunately, when I try to poke around in /System/Library/Extensions, I'm getting I/O errors...gah. I have a bad feeling about this.

  • Won't boot from Snow Leopard USB Thumb drive

    I have a 2.4 ghz Quad Core Mac Pro with 14 GB of memory...   I have created two thumb drives, one is a bootable image of the installation disk for 10.6.. the other has the 10.6 installed..
    The start up menu recognizes them both and says i can start from either but when I try I get no further the the Grey Start Up Apple....  any suggestions would be apprecoated

    They are both GUID  but since they were from an Snow Leopard Install Disk.. I believe tey are at 10.6.3
    I will try upodating the Drive with the full system.. but if that is the case then I am sort of uo thw water way with oiut a propulsion device for the Install Disk version

  • Can the new Mac Mini boot Snow Leopard from an external hard drive?

    I currently boot my 2009 Mac Mini from a FW800 external drive with 10.6.8. If I just plug my external drive into a new 2011 Mac Mini, will it boot into Snow Leopard if I set it as the startup disk or will I get a kernel panic?

    I bought a 2011 Mac Mini, which came with Lion installed. I thought maybe I could repartition it and have a Snow Leopard partition. So I repartitioned it (500gb split into two 250gb partitions). I named the new partition "SnowLeopard" just to make it easy for me to tell the difference.
    I attached the external DVD and put in a Snow Leopard installer disc, holding down the C key so it would boot and install from that, but it just spun for awhile. Doesn't appear to work.
    Then I read somewhere else that someone had managed to clone a copy of Snow Leopard onto an external drive and boot from that. In their situation they were talking about a MacBook, but the principle seemed sane.
    So I rebooted, holding down the T key to put the Mac Mini into Target hard disk mode, and attached it via Firewire to another MacMini (circa 2008 or so, not sure of year, but it was upgraded last year to Snow Leopard and has been upgraded along and along). Then I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy Snow Leopard (that is, the entire hard disk-- System and all applications and data) to my newer Mac Mini's "snow leopard" partition.
    For yucks, when it was done cloning, I restarted the older Mac Mini, and had it boot from the newer Mac Mini's snow leopard partition--- it worked! To make it easy to tell the difference, I changed the desktop background to something completely different. I think I tried booting from Lion but I can't remember if that worked.
    Then I rebooted the newer Mac Mini, which booted up in Lion, of course. Going into System Settings, I changed the startup disk to the "snow leopard" partition, and rebooted, and it booted up in Snow Leopard.
    I have yet to test the applications on the Snow Leopard partition. Another problem has arisen.
    Because with both of the Mac MInis being active on the network, they both had the same computer and user name. So I renamed the newer Mac Mini to something completely different, and changed the password.
    Unfortunately, now I cannot change any other setting in the System Settings that requires a password. While the newer Snow Leopard lets me log in with the new user and new password, whenever I try to click the "lock" icon to change something, I'm prompted for a username and password. Apparently this is some different username and password than either the new or old username/password.
    I've tried various combinations of both: new user/old password, old user/new password, old user/old password, etc.
    So if you do what I've done, be careful about changing the username and password on your cloned computer. I think it may be wiser to create a new user and then delete the old cloned users. I may just have to re-clone the old Mac Mini to the new one again.
    If anyone has any ideas about this password conundrum, please pass along!

Maybe you are looking for