My Mac Won't Start! A Tiny Guide.
Sad Mac from thomazito. all rights reserved.
Bored cocktail-party companions will know that I went through a two week period of enforced disconnection from my Mac (yet another logic board failure). Happily, the machine is back, and they even cleaned it up and gave me a new keyboard.
My Mac Won't Start! A Tiny Guide is a little eight page, single sheet of paper booklet folded in pocketmod style that gives you all of the basic troubleshooting tools you need to boot into safe mode, fsck the disk, or boot to Firewire mode so that you can mount the drive remotely.
This troubleshooting guide was co-created by two designer-friendly computer support firms: CreativeTechs in Seattle and Forget Computers in Chicago. Both companies have spent years helping creative teams stay productive with today's changing technology.
If tech origami is not your style, they also have a non-pocketmod format page.


http://applejack.sourceforge.net/
Also look at AppleJack. It wraps a nice menu around some of the tasks that happen in single-user mode (boot with command-S), both big things like fsck and littler things like deep-sixing corrupted preference files.
I am counting on AppleJack to spare me some hassle at some point -- have given an older Mac to some family members, and it is a nice enough menu that I wouldn't mind talking someone through it over the phone.
Posted by: Brian | November 01, 2006 at 10:33 AM