12.5. Single User Mode

12.5.1. Dropping to single user mode

The easiest way to get to single user mode is to use shutdown now. It will drop you into single-user mode without unmounting all your filesystems or rebooting:

# shutdown now

This method should only be used if the system is relatively quiet. This can easily be used with a home desktop system with one user.

You should only run fsck on unmounted filesystems, or read-only filesystems in single-user mode. If you run fsck -p using the shutdown now method you will get these errors since the filesystems are still mounted:

/dev/ad0s1a: NO WRITE ACCESS
/dev/ad0s1a: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY: RUN fsck MANUALLY

12.5.2. Rebooting into single user mode

Alternatively, if you reboot to a single user mode with the -s flag, you need to issue the following additional commands:

# fsck -p
# mount -u /
# mount -a -t ufs
# swapon -a