Do the following if you repeatedly startup into Setup Assistant:
1) Restart or force-shutdown your Mac. If your Mac supports it, press the reset button to restart the Mac. Otherwise, hold the power button down for 10 seconds until the Mac shuts down.
2) Turn your Mac on by pressing the power button, and then immediately hold down Command-S to start up in "single user mode". You should see white text displayed on a black background. (This may seem a bit scary; don't worry, we'll try to keep this as brief as possible).
3) Since we most likely had to force the Mac to shut down, we first want to check the hard drive to make sure it's okay. To do that type the following at the prompt and then type return:
<pre>/sbin/fsck -fy</pre>
Note that there is a space between the "k" of fsck, and the "-" of -fy.
You should see text similar to the text that's displayed when you check your hard drive with Disk Utility's "Verify Disk" command.
Once it's finished checking and repairing the drive if necessary, we need to mount the drive in "read-write" mode so that we can make changes to it. To do that, we type the following at the prompt and hit return:
<pre>/sbin/mount -uw /</pre>
Note that there is a space between "/sbin/mount" and "-uw", and a space between "-uw" and the slash "/".
4) Now that we've mounted the hard drive, we need to rename the two files that are causing the Setup Assistant program to load at startup. By renaming them, we'll make sure that OS X doesn't see them once we restart. The files are named ".SoftwareUpdateAtLogout" and ".SoftwareUpdateOptions". We will rename them by removing the period, "." from the beginning of the filename. To rename the first file, type the following at the prompt and press return:
<pre>mv /private/var/db/.SoftwareUpdateAtLogout /private/var/db/SoftwareUpdateAtLogout</pre>
Note that there is a space between "mv" and "/private/var/db/.SoftwareUpdateAtLogout", and a space between "/private/var/db/.SoftwareUpdateAtLogout" and "/private/var/db/SoftwareUpdateAtLogout".
Then, to rename the second file, type the following at the prompt and press return:
<pre>mv /private/var/db/.SoftwareUpdateOptions /private/var/db/SoftwareUpdateOptions</pre>
Note that there is a space between "mv" and "/private/var/db/.SoftwareUpdateOptions", and a space between "/private/var/db/.SoftwareUpdateOptions" and "/private/var/db/SoftwareUpdateOptions".
5) Now that we've renamed the files, we need to restart your Mac normally. To do that, type the following at the prompt and press return:
<pre>restart</pre>
Your Mac should now start up normally. If you still need to install updates, try downloading the stand-alone versions from Apple's site rather than using Software Update.
Hope this helps....
Message was edited by: MarkDouma®
