Make Your Computer Start Up with the New Computer Setup Program
Remember when you first got your Mac? When you first turned it on, it booted into a flashy video sequence before it had you begin configuring your users and settings. You may know that if you restore your computer from the original DVDs that you can achieve the results, but what if you dont want to erase the hard drive? You can achieve the same thing, but youll have to be OK with running some terminal commands.
This is definitely a more advanced tip, can be difficult to learn at first, and you can screw things up. Please make sure its what you want to do.
First, you need to reboot your machine in single-user mode. This mode will start the computer up in a text-only terminal (kind of like a Unix version of DOS). You wont get any windows or graphicsTo start up in single-user mode, turn your computer on while holding down the Command and S keys until your screen begins to show text (rather than the spinning Apple logo).
Eventually, the text will stop loading, and youll be left at a prompt with the pound key: #. Once youre there, Im going to have you type a few things. Make sure you type it exactly as I have written it (hit the Return key at the end of each line):
mount -uw /
What we did here was tell the computer to make your hard drive readable and writable. Im now going to have you type the command that will erase all of your users data. If you dont want to do this for some reason, dont type the next line and continue to the next paragraph. I assume you want to erase your personal data, however, since you want the computer to start up as though its brand new.
rm -rf /Users/*
The above command says to remove absolutely everything in the Users folder (make sure you type shift-8 to make the asterisk symbol at the end of the line).
Now, type this:
cd /var/db/
rm .AppleSetupDone
rm .TimeMachine.Cookie
rm .TimeMachine.Results.plist
rm .com.apple.iokit.graphics
rm -rf dhcpclient
rm -rf samba
Whew! We had a bunch of commands there. Basically, these are settings and preference files for some programs on the Mac, and we want those to be reset when the computer turns back on. The most important file to remove is the .AppleSetupDone file (and yes, it does start with a period). When this file is present, the computer boots up normally. When it is absent, the computer thinks youre turning it on for the first time and boots up to the flashy set up program.
Were done, so youve got two choices: if you want to shut the computer down, type:
shutdown -h now
If you want to reboot the computer (to check out your handy work), type:
reboot
Thats it! With the above steps, you can install whatever software you like, then make your computer act like its brand new.
Sent from my iPhone 4!
