Progress Bar on Grey Boot Screen

This has happened to me as well, but I don't have a dual boot system as many others do. While the progress bar is now gone at start up, my late June 09 17" MBP now takes aprox 15 min to boot and hangs with spinning ball at every click of the mouse for 1 min plus. Started for me after freeze at wake from sleep that required a hard reboot. Anyone else had this? Will try disk warrior tomorrow at office but this seems not like disk issues rather like the firmware update scrambled something deeper. (from my iPhone)

Message was edited by: MikePDX

Short update: After rebooting a coupla times, it seemed like the lost data got more and more re-discovered, every time I booted up, I had some additional data back. Over that course, a "lost & found" folder appeared on my drive as well etc... Nevertheless, I got tired of the long booting time, formatted the Mac OS partition (which was a drama in itself) and reverted to Leopard. The problems have disappeared, I ran another check, no evidence to suggest it was an HDD issue.
Prior to formatting, I did check the Console log, and it would seem that the Mac got woken at some point and started giving out write errors or so (funnily enough, it still could write that log). I saw the couple of attempts of me opening Mail that triggered a cascade of errors then crashed the app. So there definitely was some read/write issues, but not sure whether they were caused by the OS or an erratic HDD glitch.

I experience this progress bar, but only when booting in safe mode. Curiously, however, the bar always disappears at around 30%, but boot continues.

I too am experiencing Snow Leopard Boot issues post Boot Camp installation. XP solely for Flight Sim X you understand, X-Plane just don't cut it 🙂.

1. After first boot to OSX, post boot camp install - could not install any software within OSX, installer failed with a write fault irrespective of package attempting to install. As a result, I deleted all Library/Receipts/Packages in an attempt to diagnose/re-install fresh packages. Was attempting to re-install iTunes at the time as it refused to 'see' my Apple TV.

2. OSX will now not boot - 10% progress bar which then clears and spinning star remains requiring hard power down. Possibly stuck in a bad safe mode loop?

3. Boot from DVD to attempt to re-install SL. Allows me to select OSX Volume but then transpires OSX Volume cannot be accessed/written to. Disk Utility does not allow Repair Disk Permissions (greyed out).

4. One attempt at booting to OS X utilizing rEFIt worked but resulted in no desktop icons and "the application finder can't be opened - 10810".

All seems permissions related to me - OSX installer could not initially write to disk, subsequent to my booting problems neither can the SL DVD installer itself, and on the one fluke boot to OSX even finder can't play ball?

So iMac is properly FUBARd, bummer as just had the HDD replaced 3 weeks ago - having a bad run.

Next stop - will try without the 1TB FW800 drive plugged in.
Next stop - iPartition and reformat OSX Volume I guess.

Any advice / Terminal commands prior to the reformat would be greatly appreciated but it looks like I will have to be using the services of TimeMachine for the second time this month...

Apple have big issues here for sure, can anyone tie down the common factor (external drive/boot camp/EFI/permissions) ??

RM

Update (and sorry off topic, but just for completeness):

iPartition - could not format the OSX Partition - so partitioned without format.
Disk Utility - then used disk utility to reformat - went fine.
Restore - SL DVD Boot and restore.

Oh dear - now stuck on Restoration process for second time ('rewound' to an earlier backup image from 2 days prior) at 100.3% and 178384432 hours remaining with seemingly no FW800 disk access going on?? Glad I had a backup ;-(.

Any thoughts appreciated - looks like I am in a whole world of hurt and doing a fresh format and install !!!! Never had that in 4 years of OSX use. This is just like the bad old days of windowze (and ironic that XP partition works fine !!!)

RM

I have the same problem.

Running a 2009 Mac Mini that I got last week. Installed new 320gb Western Digital 7200rpm drive and 4gb of ram. Computer has worked fine. Using it primarily for work related reasons, usually Windows 7 on bootcamp partition.

Can't boot into windows.

When booting into OSX, I see the progress bar, total boot takes about 7 minutes.

DNS Not working, but airport detects networks.

Drive claims I have 78gb free when I should have closer to 150gb

Verify Disk told me to repair the disk, booted to SL CD, repairing the disk failed.

Windows works perfectly when using startup disk to boot to disk.

This ***** a lot.

Got the same problem, I'm totally bumped out. My luck: it ocassionaly boots.
Don't get it though. Took me like 10+ boots before it it finally booted through (Got the progress bar for about 10%, then disappears).

When it finally did, I got no DNS. Rebooted again, and now everything works fine. Little scared about shutting down my iMac again.. This happened after a Bootcamp installation.

Is there a way to fix this when you are succesfully booted into osx?

Final update:

Eventually restored from TM by resetting OSX partition to a single contiguous volume (had originally set it as a System and Data partition as per pre-crash state) - that did the trick and restored the TM OSX System partition successfully. Then re-partitioned back to an OSX System partition and OSX Data partition (and recovered data from TM), sweet for my backup regime and I share the Data Partition with 'Ignore Owners' set for iTunes/iPhoto and all data sharing between accounts. NB: Throughout this procedure I left the original XP partition untouched.

To finish and re-fix XP:

1. Used Tuxera NTFS to access XP partition from OSX and reconfigure boot.ini to reflect the correct XP partition for boot (now partition 4). Sweet program.

http://www.tuxera.com/products/tuxera-ntfs-for-mac/

2. Used rEFIt to configure boot up for OSX or XP (for flight sim use only). Very neat bootloader.

http://refit.sourceforge.net/

3. Used Apple advice to bludgeon XP SP3 to work (SP3 Copy Error Dialogue). Go figure, but it worked.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3841

Now back up and running thanks to TM. Also now run a scheduled Bootable System Clone just so I don't have this faff in case of emergency.

So, in 4 years of Apple use - my first major install problem (ironically with an XP install) ends in success, largely due to TM and the ease of recovery.

Best of luck y'all.

RM

Yesterday and this morning I got the same thing.
It is the same progressbar you get when you boot in save mode.
But I did not hit the shift key.

Add me to the list.

Yesterday I started experiencing random crashes on my MacBookPro. My SL installation is over a month old and I'm not running BootCamp/extra partitions, though I am using Parallels.

Today I started experiencing network issues and then a test account wouldn't log in. I forced quit the login after almost 30 minutes and then I got the progress bar on the boot screen. The progress bar would maybe make it 20% across, start over and then the machine would power off.

Booted from SL install disk, which took forever, ran Disk Utility (I attempted to re-select the boot disk first, but it made no difference). It only allowed me to Verify Disk, but midway through asked me to Repair instead. The repair failed and I got the message about backing up data.

Thank goodness I have a Disk Warrior disk. It took a very long time to boot, but the repair went smoothly and my laptop booted on the next try.

Everything appears to be fine, however I continue to have some flaky behavior from Firefox and when I tried Disk Utility it wouldn't launch. My Windows virtual machine seemed to take a long time to boot, but I'll likely blame that on a certain AV I was forced to install. 😉

This is the second time Disk Warrior has saved my butt.

Solved the problem on my mac mini by re-partitioning and re-installing from a backup.

Same problem on my macbook now...

Solution: Using Windows7

Snow Leopard = Fail

Never thought I'd be saying any of this...

After the comments here I tried to verify my disk and it had issues. So, I
1 - put in the Snow Leopard disk
2 - rebooted
3 - selected Utilities
4 - erased the hard drive
5 - reloaded from my last time machine backup

Everything works fine again.

Same problem here with iMac Core2Duo, running Snow Leopard. Was using XP in bootcamp last night, switched on in OSX today and couldn't connect to internet. Reboot and got progress bar. Still no internet.

I now have folders in the root directory called 'DamagedFiles', and 'lost+found'.

Could this have been caused by windows update last night?!?

Trying to repair permissions now....

Identical problem with mid-2007 Macbook Pro 15 inch. Just started last night. I did a clean reinstall of Snow Leopard a few days back. Once the progress bar passes and I get to the login screen, the finder will not boot up.

Strange - mine failed after the Windows update as well. Also, when I booted into Windows the screen settings were all messed up. 8 bit graphics, 640x480 resolution, etc. What are the chances that a graphics driver update messed up our Macs?

Thank God for Time Machine.