Surviving a Detour through MacHell or What to Do When Your Mac Won't Boot

Please note that all opinions are that of the author.

Sigh. Its been one of those days where every box I touch has blown up spectacularly and going through this taught me some interesting things that I didn’t know (or know specifically how to do) so here are some tips when your Mac won’t boot:

Command+R gets you to the low level tools for re-installing the OS. Hold Command+R down until you see the Apple logo. This should work but doesn’t always. Command+V held down until you see the Apple logo gives you a BSD style unix text listing which tells you how the boot process is going. sudo nvram boot-args=”-v” entered into a terminal window (type it and then press enter) makes the text mode boot process the standard and I’ve now done that on all my machines Command+S held down until you see the Apple logo boots the machine in single user mode. At that point you can mount the hard drive as read/write to make changes. If you see the message: BootCacheControl: Unable to open /var/db/BootCache.playlist: 2 No such file or directory then chant “iFixit Rocks!!!” and read this article and follow the directions.