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?