Can’t boot your Mac?

Should’ve had AppleJack!

AppleJack is a simple command line utility that allows you to run maintenance tasks before the system boots.

I had completely forgotten about AppleJack until last weekend. To make a long story short: My otherwise faithful Powerbook failed me and wouldn’t let me boot up into OS X. I was using it on the job, and I needed to make it work.

After several attempts to boot the machine and getting nothing but a grey screen, I finally got OS X to start. However, Finder was unusably slow and promtly became unresponsive. I knew I was screwed.

I did another hard reboot and was able to get far enough to copy some of the data i needed. Wiping the sweat from my forehead, it looked like I was going to be able to scrape by and finish the day. This is when Finder locked up again, in the middle of copying a file. At this point, the computer was not responding to any keystrokes or mouse clicks. I had to do another hard reboot, at the risk loosing a full days work.

This time, I booted into Single User Mode (hold down command+s at startup) hoping to be able to run Disk Utility. To my surprise, I was greeted by the AppleJack prompt:

I had installed it at some point in the past and remembered nothing about it. Luckily, the text prompts were easy to understand and follow. I just typed “applejack auto reboot” and walked away. When I came back, the PowerBook had fully booted and was ready to go! I logged out of my regular user account and logged back into my clean “backup” account just to be safe. I was able to copy files over to the external drive for the rest of the day, and not a single shot was lost.

My Advice: Stop whatever you are doing and install AppleJack right now!

By the time you realize you need it, it’s too late. Best of all, it’s Free!

Get it here: AppleJack