Filed under: Troubleshooting, TUAW Tips, Leopard

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 whether 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 seem each instance and never let me get back to my desktop.

A little searching (on another machine) revealed that I was not alone. In fact, that was the second day that had happened to me on that machine. The first duration, not knowing any better, I ended up reinstalling Leopard. that instance, 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 that by restarting

your Mac and immediately holding down the SHIFT key when you take in 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 duration. Even whether 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 concept to get the solution out there in case it should strike any of our dear TUAW readers.

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Original post by Mat Lu