TUAW Tip: Getting out of Setup Assistant hell

woow...
thanks a loooooot...
i was puling my hair out cosof this.

If you had your shut down and restart buttons hidden like I did, you can restart in FW Target Disk Mode and open up /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist and change PowerOffDisabled to boolean false. Then restart the problematic Mac in safe mode.

I have thesame issue, only when i reboot into safemode i don't have the option to softrestart my system. I think i checked the box to hide those buttons once.. Can someone help me with this one? Is there some sort of a option through the Single User Mode? Some lines that could reset those settings?

Please help me, my mac is useless in this state!

ps. Sorry for my English!

Thanks for this article. I had just installed the Security Update 2007-009 1.1 and I rebooted and was greeted with the Setup Assistant. I swear, if it wasn't for Spaces and Quicklook I would so be running Tiger right now.

Thank you for this article. It just happened to be after the Security Update 2007-009 1.1.
Bad Apple.

Dude, thank you so much. I just did the install on my Macbook...exactly what you described happened. I called Apple Care and some idiot told me to do all kinds of stuff that did absolutely nothing. I was pissed/terrified. At least you know what your doing. Thanks again bro!

I can confirm this problem on a revision A MacBook Pro. Typing this response on my G3 iBook!

Rebooting into Safe Mode and clicking Restart instead of logging in (which gives you the same blasted Setup Assistant) finally showed the Software Update window and was able to install them and restart fine. Finally.

First we couldn't trust Leopard because it's a "1.0" version, now we're up to 10.5.1 and Software Update has problems. I tell you what, as a semi-long time Mac fan (since iMac DV) this slide in quality and reliability exhibited by Apple in 2007 is starting to concern me.

This update kept Leopard from rebooting on my Intel MacBook. After I downloaded it and hit restart, I was looking at BLUE screen! Safe Mode didn't work. I tried all the advice from Mac FixIt's list of possible update fixes, NADA! Even Time Machine didn't help. Obviously the firmware didn't install properly because it took re-installing Leopard before I could finally get rid of that blue screen... God, it was like deja vu from my Windows days!

"Wow", I thought, "This tip looks awfully familiar!"...

Oh, wait. That's because I submitted it. Don't you usually credit these things when you use submissions verbatim? At least with a "Reader so-and-so writes" byline?

Love the site, but... Geez. Give a guy a little credit, eh?

hahaha, it makes me laugh after seeing the Get a Mac commercial where the mac guy is like yeah, some ppl r even switching back to vista. "Downgrading." Now, I love both operating systems, they both obviously have there ups and downs, but honestly, those commercials r bullshit. Remember the vista has now hardware support 1. lol, i went to 3 flippin stores to find a usb wireless network device, out of the 3, 1 was compatible with macs. Pretty much, thats 1 usb wireless device, out of 60+ that i looked at that day. And now adays, if you plug in an old scanner or printer, vista automaticaly downloads and installs drivers for u. Anyways, moving on, they should have a Mac PC commercial saying that macs users r accually downgrading back to tiger cuz leopard has so many bugs. that tould make me laugh.