I bricked my Open last night. I know exactly what caused it as well, just not sure on a strategy to fix it. If safe mode works on these things, it will be only a small problem. If I do not have access to OS X at all, I will have to find a custom solution (maybe a bootable copy of Ubuntu?). I only need access to terminal to overwrite a startup script that I created that automatically runs Synergy at boot. After the Apple boot screen, the screen goes blue and Finder never loads. I think this is because it loads Synergy in place of OS X’s window manager because I can use my mouse between my Vista OS and my bricked OS X. If this happened in Windows, I could Ctrl-Alt-Del to bring up task manager, and then run Explorer.exe from there to show the taskbar and desktop. There is no equivalent that I know of in OS X, so it needs fixed immediately. This is my first time since high school that I have had that chance to use the Mac OS and it runs beautifully on these computers. I was having a lot of fun until I got a little too cocky…

Before I bricked it, I was able to get SuperDuper! to successfully create 2 bootable backups on a 500GB external drive on 2 separate partitions. One is meant to be a backup of the preinstalled OS X and the other is to be used as a sandbox. The issue I had with SuperDuper! is that it would fail while it was attempting to erase my empty external drive. The error had something to do with being unable to find the drive’s UUID. I was able to find the workaround to this and it worked perfectly. Let me know if anyone is interested and I will post my findings. Anyway, I assumed I was untouchable since I had two backups, but without access to OS X’s terminal or Finder, I am unable to set the boot drive to one of my backups. Again, I am hoping safe mode will work. If that doesn’t work and I don’t hear any suggestions, you may get updates on my progress at my own attempt at reinstalling OS X with help from the OSx86Project community. It is worth a try before sending money and my computer to Psystar to have them reinstall after I’ve only had it for 2 days. I think some of us are capable of finding solutions to the very few limitations of these Open Computers and I am quite determined at this point to get involved. Testing individual Mac updates is my ultimate goal with use of the sandbox that I created because I am a little obsessed with the idea of running the beautiful OS X on PCs and I would love it to eventually be a seamless experience. I was having a blast with OS X (this is my first time being exposed to it and it runs amazingly well on the Open’s setup) and I made plenty of progress before I decided to edit its system files.

Wouldn't you set the boot drive in the bios ??
My plan was to clone the installed drive, maybe on a windows machine on a brand new drive.
You might wind up using Leo4all, knowing your hardware is ok.
Anyway....keep us posted.

FIXED IT! You won't believe this, but Rudy himself called me and gave me exactly the tip I needed to help me fix my issue. Pressing F8 during the BIOS load screen allows you get to the command prompt rather than boot to OS X. From there I was able to mount my HD as writable and I modified the file that was causing my issue, rebooted, and OS X loaded perfectly. Now I will need to find a better way to run Synergy at boot. Amazing work, Psystar!

The BIOS only lets you specify boot order, not the specific disk that you would like to boot from. I'm not sure if the EFI emulator takes care of that or not, which is why I have yet to test my backup and sandbox. I certainly do not want to make any edits to the EFI until I am thoroughly comfortable knowing how it works.
Thanks for the Leo4all tip. I had never heard of that wiki before. I will likely sign up to explore their content, but I will continue to post here because what I am doing is specific to the Open Computer.

Right On !
My machine arrives monday (according to UPS tracking). So I wanna 'clone' the installed drive to the same size and brand as a backup before I start to do much. I dropped a line to SuperDuper asking how I might do that just now. I guess you accomplished that already, tho you said you haven't booted from it yet.
Check out Insanelymac website...there is some news there about ;distros' etc.

Regarding switching between computers (mac/pc) using the same Keyboard,Video monitor, Mouse. A Belkin KVM switch w/ PS/2 connectors works peachy keen.
Also just installed iWork '08, no probs.

In order to boot from a USB device, your BIOS must fully support that option. This has nothing to do with either OSX or the EFI bootloader. Only on a real Mac would you be able to select which drive to boot from in System Preferences.

Regarding the Synergy issue, its quite easy to set something like that to run at startup, simply open up System Preferences, goto Accounts and select Login Items. Drag the Synergy icon into the Login Items list and you're done. It sounds as if you were trying to create a script to start Synergy before login, which is why it went wrong. Do not attempt to start anything before login unless its something thats designed to do so and you know what you're doing. If you need any further info on login scripts, startup scripts or anything of the like please feel free to contact me.

I already was able to boot from my external drive by changing the boot order in the BIOS. There are actually 2 ways to create startup items. The easiest is exactly how you explained it, but I also found that you can accomplish the same thing with a .plist file and a certain folder structure within the StartupItems system folder.

As for Synergy, it does need to load before Finder does to correctly attach to the clipboard. If you load it as a startup item, Synergy doesn't support clipboard sharing. I am fine with that for now because I use Evernote to share notes between computers, but I would prefer the simple copy on one computer and paste on another.

I put a new hard drive in my Open today. While I had the case off I checked which fan was making such a disturbingly loud noise. Ends up, the noise was coming from the fan grinding against one of the power wires. I loosened up the wire tie to give the wire enough slack to prevent it from touching the processor fan.

Fixed the noise! It is now quieter than my Dell. It sucks that Psystar likely decreased their profit margin to purchase better fans when the ones they used in the first place were just fine. They just need to better secure their power wires before shipping.