Filed under: Troubleshooting, TUAW Tips, Leopard
TUAW Tip: Getting out of Setup Assistant hell
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.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Ian said 11:53PM on 2-10-2008
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.
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afoma said 6:38PM on 2-23-2008
woow...
thanks a loooooot...
i was puling my hair out cosof this.
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John said 1:20PM on 12-15-2007
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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Tom said 1:24PM on 12-15-2007
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.
cdiggy said 1:46PM on 12-15-2007
What ever happened to the good ol' days when Software Update wasn't a scary omen? hehe
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Tom Reeves said 1:40PM on 12-15-2007
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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Michael said 1:42PM on 12-15-2007
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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Techslacker said 2:04PM on 12-15-2007
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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Alex said 2:48PM on 12-15-2007
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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Antony Watts said 3:31AM on 12-17-2007
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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Eideard said 4:45PM on 12-15-2007
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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Andi said 6:11PM on 12-15-2007
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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Goodsvandi said 5:38PM on 12-15-2007
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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Peter said 7:40PM on 12-15-2007
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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John Russell said 9:56PM on 12-15-2007
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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Mike said 12:09AM on 12-16-2007
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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Diederik Baan said 6:56AM on 12-16-2007
After the update I only got the setup assistant once. After compoleted it, it was done and everything worked fine
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Bryan said 9:42AM on 12-16-2007
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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Steve Davidson said 12:35AM on 12-17-2007
"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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Mat Lu said 1:59AM on 12-17-2007
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.