Griffin iMate X causes OS X startup crash/corruption;
Griffin iMate X causes OS X startup crash/corruption;
Mark Douma writes: "I'm pretty sure that it's the Griffin iMate driver 1.5 that's currently hosed OS X (10.1.4) for me. After X finishes startup now, however, it never makes it to the desktop, but hangs at the empty blue screen. The Finder is never loaded."
Bohdan Zachary confirms: "You get only a blue screen no matter what you do, what you try to delete etc."
Christopher Klausmeier adds: "Ever since I installed the Griffin iMate 1.5 driver this afternoon I've been unable to boot in OS X. The boot screen with the blue progress bar appears, (without words underneath), progresses to completion, then I get a blue screen with just a pointer. It briefly flashes black every 30 seconds, and repeats."
Several other readers confirm these symptoms. So far, all have reported that the only way they could recover from this situation was to completely reinstall OS X from an OS X Install CD.
Update: Mark Allen was able to recover from the iMate disaster by booting in Mac OS 9 and deleting the loginwindow.plist file (in the Library/Preferences folder of his home directory as well as in /Library/Preferences?). He adds: "I also searched for any files that were listed as modified after I installed the iMate software. I then deleted any files that contained the word iMate in its name or contents. Two of them were invisible." [Note: Mark's comment makes us wonder whether or not the technique of holding down the Shift key at startup (see Apple KB document 106756), to bypass the launch of login window items, might have allowed a successful startup.]
Update: Daniel Leighton said that he needed to delete the com.apple.loginwindow.plist in Library/Preferences, not just the loginwindow.plist files.
Update: Griffin replies (added Saturday & Sunday) Christopher Klausmeier was told by Griffin to try the "<chmod 1775> in single-user mode" tip, as described in Apple KB document 106464. It worked for him.
Griffin has now replied to us directly, pointing us to a web page they have posted on the matter, which includes the KB document info: "We figured out how to fix the installation problems some people had with the iMate 1.5 installer. Some users have emailed us directly and all have been able to recover their system."
The page also initially stated: "If the above failed to restore OS X, try this: What could happen is that the 'lastUser' field in /Library/Preferences/loginwindow.plist is set to loggedout or something else. At this point you will have to reboot in single user mode then change it to your username."
This has now been replaced with different instructions to enter <chmod a wx / Library System System/Library> in single-user mode.
There is also an iMateRemover 1.5 posted.
A look at the Griffin page shows that the 1.5 version is still listed. Beware of using it.