Bad APE = Leopard Boot Hang

So tonight, right before I was about to start some very important work due tomorrow, I had the genius idea to install Bad APE. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the product it's basically and application enhancer for OSX. Unfortunately, it doesn't work with Leopard, and if you install it, like I did, you'll be met with a solid blue screen that won't disappear during your next boot.

I was at home with no other computer and thought I'd have to do a complete reinstall; luckily for me, I just got an iPhone. Armed with the device, google and a jug of orange juice (we all have our oddities) I found a blog post about this very problem:

http://www.silvermac.com/2007/leopard-installation-problems-blue-screen/

The post basically tells you to boot into single user mode (cmnd+S during startup), check the disk (/sbin/fsck -fy), mount it (/sbin/mount -uw /) and rm -rf the following items:

• /Library/Preference Panes/Application Enhancer.prefpane


• /Library/Frameworks/ApplicationEnhancer.framework


• /System/Library/SystemConfiguration/ApplicationEnhancer.bundle


• /Library/Preferences/com.unsanity.ape.plist

For some reason this didn't work for me (I was met with "read-only file system" after each command), so I ended up just booting to the Leopard Install DVD (hold c during startup), entering terminal and deleting the files through there like so:

1. cd /Volume/osx
2. rm -rf /Library/Preference Panes/Application Enhancer.prefpane
3. rm -rf /Library/Frameworks/ApplicationEnhancer.framework
4. rm -rf /System/Library/SystemConfiguration/ApplicationEnhancer.bundle
5. rm -rf /Library/Preferences/com.unsanity.ape.plist

Once this is done, all I had to do was repair disk permissions (use the Disk Utility bundled with the Leopard Install DVD).

And now here I am, blogging about it in hopes that this knowledge will help someone else.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I must return to whatever it was I was supposed to be doing before I got distracted. Now where did I put that Urban Sombrero...