It happens to the best of us, I've done it once myself. Then when you login, the finder just sort of... dies. It can't display so many things at once on the desktop. You'd be fine if they were all in a folder, with a scroll bar, but the desktop has no scroll bar and has to show you all of them at the same time, and it just can't handle it. Even if you get a usable mouse, how do you clear the desktop when the icons are stacked eight deep? You wouldn't even see where to drag them to if you could select them all minus the hard drive.

1. boot into single user mode. Restart the computer and hold the apple and the "s" key down until you see a black screen with white text.

2. it will say disk is mounted read only, and gives you instructions for changing it to writeable. Folliow the instructins or just type "mount -uw /" and hit return.

3. you need to know the name of the user account that is messed up. List all the users by typing this command: "ls -Bolan /users". You will get a list looking something like this

code:

drwxr-xr-t    9 0    80   -  306 Sep 17  2006 .
drwxrwxr-x   35 0    80   - 1292 Mar 20 20:52 ..
-rw-rw-r--    1 501  80   - 6148 Mar  6 15:17 .DS_Store
-rw-r--r--    1 0    0    -    0 Jan 13  2006 .localized
drwxrwxrwt    7 0    0    -  238 Jan  9 15:39 Shared
drwxr-xr-x   14 501  501  -  476 Sep 25 21:21 emergency
drwxr-xr-x   15 504  504  -  510 Mar 17 21:32 guest
drwxr-xr-x   41 502  502  - 1394 Mar 20 19:03 tonyevans
drwxr-xr-x   13 503  503  -  442 Sep 14  2006 nwea

Look through the list and find your account. If someone else set it up for you the name may not be easily recognized. User accounts are numbered 501 and up, and you can see my computer has four user accounts. (the .DS_Store file does not count) For this example lets say my home is "tonyevans". If you are the only user the computer has ever had, your ID will be 501.

4. Type this command to rename your desktop folder to something else so that stuff is not displayed on your desktop anymore: "mv /users/tonyevans/Desktop /users/tonyevans/desktop2". Change both occurrances of "tonyevans" to whatever your short user name is (as identified in previous step) when typing this command. Be careful when you type this command, spaces and punctuation are always very important when using single user mode. Here it is in monospace font:
code:

mv /users/tonyevans/Desktop /users/tonyevans/desktop2

5. finally, type "exit" and you will go to your login screen or your account. If you go to your login screen and don't remember your password, just click restart and it will auto log you in as usual.

all your documents that were on your desktop are now in a folder called "Desktop2", in your home folder. You can select from the menu above to Go... Home, and then open Desktop2 to see all your files.

This will move everything that was on your desktop, except your hard drives, into that folder. Now you won't have any problem putting back the ones that belong on your desktop and moving the others where you needed them to go when the accident happened.