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Does safe mode work in Lion?

I am in the midst of working with a gentelman from Apple tech support troubleshooting a problem mounting remote Windows disks on Lion desktops. That problem has been well-publicized. Apple's engineers asked for a packet trace. The "Capture Data" Apple provided won't work when I try to do a packet trace with it, so they suggested I boot into safe mode and run it. I tried booting my MacPro into safe mode yesterday. The progress bar sat at roughly the 25% point all night and it was exactly at the same point this morning when I returned to work. I then put it into verbose mode and I could see it stalls on the step where it says "checking extended attributes file." So I booted into the Lion recovery disk and did a repair disk on the Lion disk. No problem was found. I am also not having any problems with my Mac, other than the inability to mount remote file shares in Lion, which works fine if I boot my MacPro into Snow Leopard. My Lion boot disk is a 500GB Seagate disk and Disk utility and SMART say it is fine. I also tried repairing disk permissions, but that did not help with safe booting it either.

So in order to provide the packet trace Apple requested, I just booted normally and ran tcpdump in terminal. I am waiting for Apple's response now.

In the meanwhile, I got curious so I tried booting my fairly new (current generation) MacBook Pro (also with Lion) into safe mode and it too stalls. I did this purely out of curiosity. My MacBook Pro is working fine, but it too stalls when it is booted into safe mode. So that raises the question, is there a bug in Lion that is preventing some Macs that run it from booting into safe mode? Is anyone who is reading this message able to boot a Mac running Lion in safe mode?

Posted on Aug 31, 2011 8:53 AM

22 replies

Surfrdan

Level 1

0 points

May 24, 2012 2:02 AM in response to Stanley Horwitz

I too am having a problem booting my Mac Pro. However, I'm running 10.6 rather than Lion. I too was trying to install Office 2011 and it kept failing, so I found an MSX KnowledgeBase article sugesting booting in Safe Mode (who knew OS X even had a safe mode). First I coudn't get into it by pressing SHIFT on boot. There was no startup bong noise either, I noticed. SO I boote das normal and set an nvram param to boot in verbose safe mode on next boot. Rebooted ther machine and now it sticks at ** Checking extended attributes file every time.

Surfrdan

Level 1

0 points

May 24, 2012 2:07 AM in response to Surfrdan

I've managed a successful boot by resetting the NVRAM with Command+Option+P+R and this time the bong was back. Rebooted again and it seems to be loading into Safe mode now. Fingers crossed.

Surfrdan

Level 1

0 points

May 24, 2012 2:18 AM in response to Surfrdan

Well it's still stalling trying to boot in safe mode. I'm out of ideas.

May 24, 2012 6:02 AM in response to Surfrdan

Hi Surfdan,

I am the one who started this thread. I did find a solution to the safe boot failure problem, but it isn't quick. The reason your Mac won't boot into safe mode and is stuck at the "checking extended attributes file" step is likely because of disk corruption. The extended attributes file might be corrupted.

There are at least things to do to try to fix this problem. Before attempting any of them, it is essential that you create a bootable clone of your boot drive to a different disk drive from the one you boot off of (i.e., not a partition). You are taking a huge disk with your boot disk and anything on it if you do not back it up to a cloned disk prior to attempting to fix this because you might lose your data, depending on how corrupt your boot disk is. The best way to clone your boot drive is with Carbon Copy Cloner (Google it). Before you clone the disk, make sure the target disk has been initialized and it is important to use the option in disk utility to erase free space on it. Be sure to use a target disk that does not hold any data of importance to you, since you will need to initialize it AND erase it prior to doing the clone.

First try to reinstall whatever base Mac OS X version is on youor Mac, then reinstall the updates. Then try safe boot mode again. This might be enough to fix the problem.

If not, buy a copy of DiskWarrior from Alsoft. If your Mac's boot disk is severely corrupt, DiskWarrior may fail to rebuild its directory structure. If that happens, boot from the cloned disk. Initialize AND erase the boot disk, then use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the cloned disk back to the boot disk, then run DiskWarrior against the newly copied boot disk.

Then at this point, safe boot should work fine. If not, more than likely, your Mac's boot disk is physically defective in some way and should probably be replaced.

thomas_r.

Level 7

31,989 points

May 24, 2012 6:22 AM in response to Stanley Horwitz

I see that you have found a solution. (I would have suggested disk corruption had I seen this topic sooner.) However, I do feel compelled to correct a couple mis-statements unrelated to the topic:

The information your brother gave you is wrong on two counts. First, every Mac does come with a boot disk. Second, it also comes with three months of factory warranty coverage.

Both of those statements are wrong. All currently shipping Macs no longer ship with disks. If you need the functions that were formerly provided by the disks, you do them now from recovery mode by holding down command-R at startup, which boots either from a hidden partition on the hard drive or, if that's not available, over the internet from Apple's servers.

Second, Macs come with a 1 year warranty, not 3 months.

Just clarifying for folks who may come across this topic in the future.

Surfrdan

Level 1

0 points

May 24, 2012 6:28 AM in response to Stanley Horwitz

Thanks for the response Stanley. I don't have a spare disk right now so I'll not bother. I did also manage to install Office 2011 eventually after looking at the install log it was failing to cpio the Communicator package. I didn't want Communicator anyway so I removed it by deselecting in the Customize install option and it installed successfully.

thomas_r.

Level 7

31,989 points

May 24, 2012 6:32 AM in response to Surfrdan

If your problem is disk corruption, as Stanley has said, then waiting is not an option. You could lose data if you do. Even if you have a good backup system, that may not help at all if files become corrupt and are then backed up, carrying that corruption into the backup. You'd be wise to follow Stanley's instructions ASAP.

Does safe mode work in Lion?