I’ve been nursing my iBook, Nadia, back to health for the past three hours. She gave up the ghost in the midst of a web page load, and while it would boot, it would never make it past a simple blue screen with a mouse. Doing it the Apple way, I attempted to refresh the operating system, but the problem persisted.

Having problems like this with Linux were more than common, but this is the first time that Mac OS X has really led me down the path to the single user mode. Consulting the oracle of Google, I learned how to boot into the command line, and then set to finding out what was wrong.

After a few unneeded restarts, I found out that for some reason a bunch of gibberish had been written to the global preferences file. Removing it caused the machine to return to her normal behavior.

I don’t think that the solution was a user-friendly one (by Apple standards), but I am very grateful that I was able to bring my Linux/UNIX experience to bear on the problem, and make the fix.

The patient will live. Time for some well deserved rest.