No not X Box. Mac OS X.
Ok heres the deal. The HDD in my Powerbook is failing. I.e. it does not pass a SMART verification. I think it has something to do with me leaving it on 24/7 while we were in Melbourne in Febuary

But anyway, it no longer passes an fsck. It fails on checking the catalogue. And because the drive was uncleanly unmounted, OS X tries to do a check on startup. And it fails, which means it tries to do it on the next boot. Which fails. Repeat, frustrate, repeat some more.

So the question becomes how do I bypass the fsck? There isn’t any key command to do it, or an optional start up. What I DID do is boot into single user mode. I.e. BSD terminal. It skips the fsck when I do that. Unfortunately, the terminal is limited in the sense that you can’t run your GUI apps!

I’ve found that if you just exit (type “exit”) the terminal, it tries to boot to Aqua…without the FSCK!!! Of course, it fails to load a bunch of stuff because of corrupt data, but I did get it to boot. I also found a nice reference for Mac OS X single user mode commands.

Unfortunately, every app I ran crashed instantly on startup. Oh well. At least I know it works