It's only happened once, but I received a progress bar on the gray start-up screen on a reboot. It was after a normal restart and after it ha shutdown and then started it boot up I got the progress bar, it has only happened once, but I was wondering what this bar was.
what do you mean after it boots up... it's normal after it boots up, it loads the user login screen. as i have mentioned, it is NOT in safe mode, no keys were accidentally pressed, etc.
FYI, after a couple restarts and permission repairing the grey loading bar stopped appearing and the computer boots up at it's normal speed.
My iMac did exactly the same a couple of days after upgrading to SL.
The first time it did it a message came up after boot saying that the HD is almost full. This was impossible because there was 113GB free (as verify in terminal). I tried to repair the drive, which threw up errors. I tried to format and install SL, which failed numerous times.
Now I'm left wondering if I should by a new HD. Just seems odd that it all started when I installed SL.
Also having a similar problem. Started my SL imac today and found it couldn't resolve DNS, and that the hard drive was grinding away. Opened Activity Monitor and no processes whatsoever showed up. Rebooted, and got a progress bar that seemed to hang about 60% of the way through.
Am currently using bootcamp to backup my files, then formatting. Quite irritated at this!
Same thing happened to me today on my MacBook Pro 3,1. Its been 3 days and 4 or 5 reboots since the SL install, and suddenly today I get the grey screen and progress bar.
It took about 15 mins to complete whatever it was doing, and it did indeed look like a firmware update, but as far as I can see, nothing looks like its been updated, and I wasn't warned that anything had been downloaded or was in the pipeline to be updated. I've checked all the system logs and there are no entries for the last 25 minutes, which is what I'd expect if this was a firmware update.
I was thinking that this might be an EFI update, since this MacBook Pro model doesn't yet allow the use of the 64-bit kernel due to EFI problems, but its not changed that either.
The exact same thing happened to me. DNS wouldn't resolve hosts anymore, so I rebooted. Now it's sitting at a progress bar against the grey background with the Apple logo. It's been sitting here for about 20 min. Fingers crossed it comes back up.
I tried powering down then holding Option and booting into the Mac side, rather than my Boot Camp partition. Something of note: Rather than saying Mac OS X or whatever it usually says under the picture of the hard drive, it said "EFI Boot".
Hello,
I am having a similar problem. However, it is much worse. I was restarting my computer, and I believe I held down the power button too long. I heard the beeping noise and the light on the front of my computer flashed. Then the grey bar came up on the screen. However, it only goes about a fifth of the way on the progress bar, then resets back to the beginning. Then it goes about half the way it did before, and then just shuts off. I can't start OS X at all now. I recently installed SL, maybe about a week ago, I think I downloaded the 10.6.1 update. I tried starting from the install CD, and ran the Disk Utility. I verified the disk, it said it needed to be repaired. I tried repairing, and got an error message. It told me that the disk was corrupted and that I should back up all my files and reformat the disk. However, I don't know how I can access the files as there is no finder in the installation launch, and I can't access them from my windows partition. Any ideas? Am I missing some easily accessible program that will let me access the files?
Very similar problem here too. Just started today. The first problem I noticed was that I had no internet connectivity even though my Airport was working fine and I showed a full strength signal. I thought maybe my ISP was down, but my modem showed aok. I did a restart to see if maybe something just needed to be cleared out.
Upon restart I got the gray progress bar. It made it about 10% then disappeared, then reappeared, and got to 10% again. Then the system shutdown and restarted on its own. I watched it repeat this loop for about 20 minutes before turning it off by holding down the power button. I tried again this afternoon after letting it rest a while, same thing.
I was not holding down shift during any start up, nor did I receive any unusual messages before shutdown last night.
*I still have an ongoing issue with a Wake event bug since installing SL. SL has never shutdown or gone to sleep properly since I installed it. Shutdown and Sleep act instead just like Restart. I have to hold down the power button to force a shutdown after the restart no matter if I am connected to a power supply or not. (others seem to be having similar issues)
I'm also having an issue with TM wanting to do a full backup after the SL install and it won't automatically delete old backups to make room.
I only list those other issues in case they are connected.
I cannot get the system to boot up at all. I haven't tried a safe mode boot. That is my next test.
The same thing happened to me. In addition to this, I am getting a checkered type pattern and system freeze up occasionally, which persists sometimes on reboot. After a rain dance and a couple reboots I will get the grey apple screen and progress bar. I tried disk repair by booting to the SL disk, and using disk utility, and while errors are detected during verify and repair, the repair hangs and ultimately fails. I also am trying booting to DiskWarrior, and this seems to have successfully repaired some of the disk errors. Am trying permissions repair now as well, but I fear I have faulty hardware at the root of this. Genius bar appointment tomorrow AM. Will post any helpful results.
An update to my last post: Repairing permissions does appear to have corrected the progress bar issue, at least for now. Hoping I dont see my machine crash and screen go checkered but that is still an open issue for me, and worth visiting the genius bar about.
FWIW You do not need to boot to the SL install disc and run disk utility to repair permissions; for permissions repair only, it is sufficient to boot to your startup disk normally (waiting out the progress bar, if necessary) and run disk repair, repair permissions. However, booting to your SL install disk bypasses the progress bar loading entirely, and so is a much quicker route to running Disk Utility.
Another update: had an appointment at the genius bar. I rarely get anything useful out of these appointments, but I don't blame the folks that work there as much as the process, which is geared toward fixing only the most common problems, and not much else. Anyway, they analyzed my hard drive and saw no errors, and informed me that the problem was likely in my logic board or possibly video card, and that I could have the machine sent out to replace the defective parts for a flat fee of $325 (or thereabouts), parts and labor included. But they made no hard diagnosis, just a guess based on my description and their experiences (the machine functioned normally while I was at the store). They also recommended, as a last ditch effort, to do a backup of data, reformat of the drive, and fresh install of snow leopard and see if that corrects the problem. I will do a bit more research on my own and probably try the fresh install next.
Just wanted to chime in as well. I had the exact same thing happen to me. Booted out of bootcamp back into Mac OS X 10.6.1 and DNS wasn't working. Rebooted and got the gray screen with the progress bar. It would jump to ~ 20%, then back to 0%, then back to 20%, then it would power off.
I booted to the SL disk and tried to verify disk using disk utility and it reported issues. So, I tried repairing and - as usual with Disk Utility - it failed.
Luckily I had another Mac with Diskwarrior. I booted my macbook pro (the June 09 revision w/SD slot) into target disk mode and connected it to my other mac. I was able to use Diskwarrior to repair and rebuild the directory index and am now back up and running.
I didn't want to have to format and reinstall everything - just an idea for others at this point.
My Macbook Pro 13" tonight started going slow, so I did a reboot.
I then got the firmware type progress bar and eventually it got to the desktop and said I had almost run out of disk space.
***, I had 140gb of space earlier, now down to 1.3GB
I did a CMD S and booted up and tried to run applejack but it would not launch.
ran fsck, came up with sibling errors which it couldn't fix
did a target mode and attached to another macbook
ran disk utility and still could not fix sibling errors
ran diskwarrior 4.1 and it sat for ages looking at the directory. it then gave me a temp directory to look at which I used to recover the files which time machine hadn't yet had chance to capture.
then clicked yes please replace the directory with the new one and then my spare macbook crashed with a kernel panic.
Ran DW again and got the drive up again, but it said it couldn't fix it.
have now rebooted the macbook pro and the firmware bar went across the screen again.
my log in window appeared and the disk space error came back up.
I then click ignore this and continue and am now waiting to see what happens, just looking at the desktop pattern and a cursor at the moment.
If it does come to life I shall plug in my TM drive and just update that and I then think I'm going to have to format the drive and start again and then restore from TM.
ok well the machine rebooted but just sat there at the desktop pattern and nothing else.
sod it, got the SL dvd out, rebooted, formatted the hard disk and restored from my last TM backup.
Took about 5 hours so left it running through the night.
Got up this morning and clicked restart.
All good so far.
copied back the files I had manually recovered off the drive.
launched all my apps. all ok.
Well, apart from MAIL.
It started complaining that I was using the wrong version, not 4.1 Well I was using 4.1
A quick google and I see a few people were getting MAIL errors, so I downloaded the 10.6.1 updater again and ran it.
Rebooted.
MAIL now working.
OK, all now working..
Time to plug back in the TM drive and let it backup.
It thinks for a while and then complains that there isn't enough room on the drive to complete. Obviously not happy in continuing the backup.
Reformatted the TM drive and then left it for a few hours to do a backup again.
I've absolutely no idea why the problem occurred. (FYI I am an independent Apple reseller, been servicing/selling Macs since 1987 so am very competent in problem solving)
I've refrained from rolling out SL to my clients until I'm perfectly happy with it, and so far I'm glad I have done that. Can't afford for my customers to have this 'firmware progress bar error' occur on their systems.
I'm having this problem too, and my iphone will no longer dock with itunes and/or charge up anymore. And im getting errors trying to update itunes lol...
What a nightmare..
I have a couple of questions regarding this.
I have a windows installation on the computer with some heavy duty files that i very much don't want to redownload.
Can i restore from time machine retaining my windows partition? or is it going to want to totally scrub the drive back to a single partition?
My second question is, since I have updated to snow leopard but my initial time machine backup was run on regular leopard, what operating system will I see after the restore is complete?
Should i reset time machine and back it up as it is? or would that possibly copy the same errors with it, or are the errors on a purely disk level ?
Very confusing and frustrating topic, I hate the idea of my mac being in anything but perfect working order, there's too much stuff on it that I need.
My MBP started doing the same thing last night. console.log showed applications having write issues from about 9pm on, a couple of crashes of Mail because of that, which was the point at which I rebooted, got the grey progress bar. Since it didn't seem to move, I turned off the computer, booted into my Vista partition, at which point my Mac HD was still looking good and intact with all data there. I rebooted again, let the progress bar run its 5-minute course, seemed to work well, did an HDD scan, no errors or bad blocks on the disk. Powered up again this morning, 5-minute progress bar again, and now I am missing a coupla data folders I had in root, I have 24 folders called "
342921" through "
342945", all empty, I have a file "20091010165353.not_terminated" and a "Damaged Files" folder...
Does any of that ring a bell?
Will do a reformat later in the day and restore from Time Machine, recently only installed a pre-release of Digidesign Pro Tools that might be iffy, other than that all software I've been running for years. It kinda seems like something got stuck when I woke the computer up again.
