Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Resolved Erase Specific File From HDD w/ Boot CD?

D

dustycloud

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 8, 2014
6
0
I've got an old PowerPC G3 with OS X 10.4.11 Tiger. Yesterday, I created /etc/launchd.config to raise maxfiles to 1024 on startup, in an effort to better automate a backup program. After a restart, the computer stopped booting at the grey screen w/ spinner.

When I start up the iMac in either Safe Boot w/ debug or Single-User Mode, I get spammed with "file: table is full". Bottom line, if I could just delete /etc/launchd.config I imagine it would solve the issue. I have a Boot CD and access to USB drives - how can I accomplish this?
 
Last edited:
dustycloud said:
...
When I start up the iMac in either Safe Boot w/ debug or Single-User Mode, I get spammed with "file: table is full". Bottom line, if I could just delete /etc/launchd.config I imagine it would solve the issue. I have a Boot CD and access to USB drives - how can I accomplish this?
Click to expand...

If your "Boot CD" is your Tiger installer DVD, then you can boot to that installer, click through to where the installer would be ready to work.
You'll see some menus at the top of the screen, and the Terminal should be in the Utilities menu. You can use that to get to the directory where your file is, and you can then rm that file.
You could then restart to the hard drive to check that removing that one file is all that you need to do.
Be aware that your several failed boots may have further corrupted the partition map on your hard drive, which means that you should also run Disk Utility while your are still booted to that installer disk (Disk Utility will be in that same menu), and do a Repair Disk from DU. If that completes without problems reported, then quit Disk Utility. I suspect you will need to reinstall OS X - and, conveniently, you could continue to do that, assuming you are booted to the Tiger installer DVD. Best choice then would be the Option button, where you can change the install option to an Archive & Install, also choosing the sub-option to keep your network settings and other files.
 
It is the Tiger installer DVD. However, I just tried to boot from it and it spit the disc right back out o_O
 
Cleaned the disc and it didn't spit back out. The disc shows up in the Startup Manager and am proceeding to follow your instructions. Will post back how it goes.
 
When the menus appear there is no Terminal option under Utilities. The options are Startup Disk, Reset Password, Disk Utility, System Profiler, and Network Utility.
 
This has been a journey, but I finally got it working! I found this article.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/232302/

After reading, I discovered the hard disk device identifier (disk0s9) through Disk Utility and ran this command.
mount -t hfs /dev/disk0s9 ~

I then navigated to /etc/launchd.config and proceeded to rm it. Being a noob and assuming it saved the change, I then hard shutdown the Mac. After discovering nothing had changed, I repeated the mount and rm but this time ran the clearly spelled out command to boot the OS while still in Single-User mode (that being sh /etc/rc), after which point I was returned to the OS X installation screen.

Restart to HDD using Startup Disk and it's alive! Thank you DeltaMac for pointing me in the right direction. <3
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back