Last night, after installing the QuickTime 7.3.1 update on my Leopard machine, upon restart I was greeted with a distressing sight: the OS X Setup Assistant that's only supposed to run when you first install OS X. Furthermore, even if I completed the Setup Assistant it would just run again in a kind of permanent loop; I was caught in Setup Assistant hell! No matter how many times I restarted, the Setup Assistant would appear each time and never let me get back to my desktop.A little searching (on another machine) revealed that I was not alone. In fact, this was the second time this had happened to me on this machine. The first time, not knowing any better, I ended up reinstalling Leopard. This time, however, I discovered that Apple has acknowledged the problem with a Support Document. Fortunately, there is a way out of Setup Assistant hell: booting into Safe Mode.
You do this by restarting your Mac and immediately holding down the SHIFT key when you hear the chime. Hold it until you see the rotating gear below the grey Apple on the startup screen. Release it and the computer should eventually take you to the login screen with "Safe Mode" in red. One word of caution: give the computer plenty of time. Even if it appears stuck give it a chance to work; go get a cup of coffee and come back. Anyway, once you're in Safe Mode you can now hit "restart" and things should eventually get back to normal (perhaps after some updates are installed).
This problem seems to be a Leopard bug related to software updates. It's so disconcerting that I thought it would be a good idea to get the solution out there in case it should strike any of our dear TUAW readers.
Update: Head nod to Steve D who apparently discovered the same thing a few days ago.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
12-15-2007 @ 1:20PM
John said...
Wow, I knew when software update came up and asked if it wanted to install a quicktime update something would go wrong. I said to myself "Hmm, lets wait a few days to see if anybody has any problems with this, it always happens with the quicktime updates".
*Pats self on back*
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12-15-2007 @ 1:24PM
Tom said...
Same thing, man. But it's because I didn't wanna restart. I installed the garageband update, but still haven't on the QT. I'm glad I didn't, even though I could have reinstalled and restored from a time machine backup.
12-15-2007 @ 1:40PM
Tom Reeves said...
I had this problem. Since I didn't exactly know what to do if I shut down my MPB, I let it run far longer than I might have let a Windows machine run. Eventually, the installation completed itself. I think it took longer than 5 minutes which obviously signifies a bug somewhere. If not, Apple should explain the long wait as part of the upgrade. www.pwnership.com
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12-15-2007 @ 1:42PM
Michael said...
Well, had the same Problem, but my system got stuck at the reboot. After resetting it, I had this problem too, but a normal restart brought up the Updater, installed again, rebooted and everything worked fine afterwards.
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12-15-2007 @ 1:46PM
cdiggy said...
What ever happened to the good ol' days when Software Update wasn't a scary omen? hehe
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12-15-2007 @ 2:04PM
Techslacker said...
I had this problem as well. I found that after going through the setup assistant a few times that when I did an actual shutdown rather than a reboot as I had been doing, the quicktime update was installed and everything was fine when I started it up after shutting down.
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12-15-2007 @ 2:48PM
Alex said...
This happened to my mac mini when I updated to 10.5.1. I had to restore the system from the (finished that day) Time Machine backup.
Glad to know of a solution though. Pity is that machine wont backup to time machine any longer.
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12-15-2007 @ 4:45PM
Eideard said...
Booting in safe mode takes so long because in the course of completing that boot - it checks and resets permissions as needed. I generally do a safe boot 1ce/wk just for that purposes > followed by a regular reboot.
And all of this is just another good reason to go to apple support and use the direct download for updating.
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12-15-2007 @ 5:38PM
Goodsvandi said...
A bit like this ad.. you mean?
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1847518834380546279&q=apple+windows+restart+ad&total=11&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0
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12-15-2007 @ 6:11PM
Andi said...
I had the same screen, rang up apple care and they directed me the way you have explained, pretty scary though, wonder how many people have reformatted LOL
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12-15-2007 @ 7:40PM
Peter said...
I had this exact thing happen when I updated to Leapord, and then my timemachine backup was hay wire too. I was panicking, because this is was the first time I had run into problems on my mac in a long time. I also found the safe mode reboot article and prayed to the software gods.
Scary as hell
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12-15-2007 @ 9:56PM
John Russell said...
Same thing happened when I installed 10.5.1. Good thing I found the support document, I wasn't all that far away from just reinstalling Leopard.
Maybe I'll just wait to install, despite the fact that I was just about to restart my computer.
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12-16-2007 @ 12:09AM
Mike said...
Did Apple outsource Leopard development to India or China? Leopard seems to have an awful lot of problems considering how minor of an upgrade it is and how long it was in development.
I tried Leopard and went back to Tiger a week later. Very disappointing update.
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12-16-2007 @ 6:56AM
Diederik Baan said...
After the update I only got the setup assistant once. After compoleted it, it was done and everything worked fine
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12-16-2007 @ 9:42AM
Bryan said...
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.
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12-17-2007 @ 12:35AM
Steve Davidson said...
"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?
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12-17-2007 @ 1:59AM
Mat Lu said...
Of course we credit when we get something from someone. As it happens, though, I did not see your tip before writing this post.
Nonetheless, I'm happy to acknowledge.
12-17-2007 @ 3:31AM
Antony Watts said...
I had a similar problem with Tiger! After installing QT some of the permanent items i had in my menu bar disappeared. And I haven't managed to get them back yet!
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12-17-2007 @ 4:09PM
Russ said...
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!
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12-19-2007 @ 12:21AM
Ruben Schade said...
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.
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