One click installer killed my macbook pro

Hello.

Please help me. I've downloaded and run the latest one click installer on my macbook pro running osx 10.5.8.

The installer said it had adjusted some memory settings and I must reboot which I did. Now my macbook will not start.

I get the Apple logo and the spinning graphic and then it just switches off.

I tried to start in safe mode using the shift key but safe mode does not appear.

Please help. Your installer just killed my machine !

thanks

neilc2011 wrote:Hello.

Please help me. I've downloaded and run the latest one click installer on my macbook pro running osx 10.5.8.

The installer said it had adjusted some memory settings and I must reboot which I did. Now my macbook will not start.

I get the Apple logo and the spinning graphic and then it just switches off.

I tried to start in safe mode using the shift key but safe mode does not appear.

Please help. Your installer just killed my machine !

thanks

Hi,

I'd be suspicious of something else - all the installer has done at this point is create a /etc/sysctl.conf file with some shared memory settings in it, which OSX will ignore if it doesn't like.

To undo the changes the installer made, all you need to do is remove /etc/sysctl.conf (the installer will only create it if it doesn't already exist), and reboot. As you cannot boot normally at present, I would suggest booting from your OSX installation media, which should allow you to mount the main disk (it may do that automatically, I forget) and remove the file before rebooting.

If the machine still won't boot after removing the file, there's something else wrong (similarly, if it won't boot from the OSX installation media).

HTH.

Hi there

Thank you for your reply.

I started in single use mode, as this was all that would work. I renamed the file /etc/sysctl.conf and my system starts fine.

Here is a copy of the file that the installer wrote.

kern.sysv.shmmax=33554432
kern.sysv.shmmin=1
kern.sysv.shmmni=256
kern.sysv.shmseg=64
kern.sysv.shmall=8192

I've got 4gb of ram in my machine.

Not sure where to go from here really.

neilc2011 wrote:Hi there

Thank you for your reply.

I started in single use mode, as this was all that would work. I renamed the file /etc/sysctl.conf and my system starts fine.

Here is a copy of the file that the installer wrote.

kern.sysv.shmmax=33554432
kern.sysv.shmmin=1
kern.sysv.shmmni=256
kern.sysv.shmseg=64
kern.sysv.shmall=8192

I've got 4gb of ram in my machine.

Not sure where to go from here really.

Very bizzarre - that's a standard config that the installer uses on any machine that doesn't have the default settings overridden already. It's been used in tens, probably hundreds of thousands of machines in the past, including my own with both 4 and 8GB of RAM.

I used to use the following settings on an old machine with just 2GB RAM. It would be interesting to see if those settings work:

kern.sysv.shmmax=1610612736
kern.sysv.shmall=393216
kern.sysv.shmmin=1
kern.sysv.shmmni=32
kern.sysv.shmseg=8
kern.maxprocperuid=512
kern.maxproc=2048