Single User Mode won't recognize any commands

[killerbee79]

I need help from people who are knowledgable abou these Mac wonders of the world and single user mode.

I'm trying for the life of me to run "memtest" in single user mode and am finding it impossible.

After I boot into single user mode, I get a "Shell>" prompt.

I type in /sbin/fsck/ -y to do some check thing. I then type in /sbin/mount -uw /

Both times I get an error saying that "/sbin/yada yada yada is not recognized as an internal or external command, batch or whatever"

No commands work at all. I have no clue what I'm doing and am using instructions from where I got the memtest app. Sure I could just run it from the Terminal but then you're not testing all of the RAM, only the available portion. There's a huge chunck that won't be tested as OSX is using it. I want to do this as I just upgraded RAM to 8G with Crucial and now my MBP is acting very slow and weird.

HELP???? Why does this have to be sooooo hard.

 

[Weaselboy]

You should not need to type on the full path to get to those system commands. For example, just entering "fsck -fy" (without the quotes) in single user mode will do a disk check.

Same with memtest. You should be able to just enter "memtest all 2" at the single user command line.

 

[killerbee79]

My problem got resolved. Someone on the Apple discussion boards had the same issue and told me what to do.

The problem was that I use Refit bootloader. So when I hold down Command-S on start I am actually entering a single user mode inside the refit shell. Instead of this I need to wait for the Mac to boot up Refit. When the Mac partition is highlighted push "F2" and then some boot options will show, one of them is OSX single user mode. Wala, I'm in the correct single user mode and everything works much much better.

I was my own undoing in this endeavor due to my use of Refit.