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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

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22 replies

Nov 18, 2011 6:35 AM in response to Stanley Horwitz

I am having exactly the same problem as you–the progress indicator is stuck at about 30% for hours.


I'm having an absolute nightmare trying to install Microsoft Office 2011 on my Mac pro running Lion, and the Microsoft support technician eventually asked me to boot into safe mode and try the installation from there.


Were you able to resolve your issue? If so, how?

Nov 18, 2011 8:24 AM in response to martinz

Still having the same problem. The one thing I haven't tried is turning FV off and seeing if I can safe boot. It hasn't impacted any of my installs however. I also used the latest update of Diskwarrior to repair my disk directory. A number of areas were found. Hard drive access improved a great deal. Again though, the safe mode boot freezes at about 30% complete.


Norm

Nov 18, 2011 8:47 AM in response to MooneyPilot

I am not using FileVault at all, and never have - doesn't prove that it isn't related to your problem, of course, but at least means it's not the only possible cause.


I am having no issues, except with installing office 2011.


Initially Office appeared to install correctly, but after installation the auto updater failed because it claimed not to be able to find the Office installation.


Microsoft tech support had me manually completely remove the office installation, and now the installation itself reports failure, although it leaves working applications (but the autoupdate still fails to find the installation).


They are suggesting that whatever is causing the Mac not to be able to boot into safe mode is also causing the problem with the office install. Like you the disk utility finds no issues with my desk.

Nov 20, 2011 4:09 AM in response to martinz

I had the problem of not being able to boot into safe mode on two of my Macs. Safe boot mode works fine on my iMac. Yesterday, I finally had time to attempt to fix it on my Mac Pro tower and my MacBook Pro. What I did on both of them is to clone the boot drive to a spare disk drive, then I booted from the spare drive and initialized the internal boot drive and cloned back the clone onto the newly initialized drive.

This approach worked fine on my Mac Pro and it can now boot into safe mode. Unfortunately, it does not work on my MacBook Pro laptop. I used an third party disk utility to check the integrity of the drive and it passes all tests, yet it sill will not go into safe book mode. I am going to open a tech support request with Apple about it momentarily since I do have AppleCare on my laptop.

Nov 20, 2011 4:55 PM in response to martinz

I went to the Apple Store near me today to have a Mac Genius look at my laptop. Unfortunately, he found no explanation for the problem with safe boot. He ran diagnostics on my laptop, but nothing wrong showed up. His recommendation was to do a clean OS install, then re-install all my apps from the original media and then copy my documents over from my backup disk drive.


Since this problem is not a big deal for me, I will do that next month when I have some spare time.

Nov 22, 2011 6:46 AM in response to Stanley Horwitz

Another data point. I had thought that FileVault 2 may have been the culprit as I have two machines that can handel the safe mode start up and one that can't. The one that can't has FileVault on. I turned it off this past weekend, but found that my machine still couldn't boot into safe mode. So I think I can cross FileVault activation off the list of associations to this problem.


Norm

Jan 27, 2012 9:27 PM in response to Stanley Horwitz

My brother's mac (he just got a couple of months ago) came with lion already installed. Apple did not include any OSx disks or install dvds (he claims). I consider myself to be very tech savey but this is just rediculious. First off, when I boot his computer everything works fine. Emediatly after a couple of seconds the login is prompted. Then after typing the password (and pressing enter) the apple logo/grey screen of death appears, then a loading bar (which is stuck at 10%) at which it is frozen. I have tried verbose (which says the file system has been modifyed; also says a lot of runtime corruption data on [ErrType FS] on /dev/disk1). At the bottom of verbose it says "Launch_msg(): Socket is not connected; couldn't get description from Disk Arbitration; WARNING: Kextd unavailable; proceeding w/o lock for <unknown>." I have also tried booting by Command-apple + R. There I checked the disk permissions but there are no errors. In the Disk utility, where it says listed hard drives is the 750.16 GB Toshiba MK, Macintosh HD, & Superdrive. Then there is a line, underneth that line is Disk 1, Mac OS X Base System (I have no idea what this is and I am guessing this is the problem). After verifying the Toshiba MK.. it says no known errors. I have tried to reinstall Mac OS x but after I begin this option in the Command + R menue but it says that it quit unexpectedly and that I should try to reinstall the application. If I choose to emediatly go back to the disk utility and try to verify or repair permissions it will begin and emmediatly stop and in big red words in the permissions menue appear as ERROR and that the permissions had to stop unexpectedly. The last solution I could find was to boot in safe mode; However, apparently on this brand new mac there is no safe mode because holding down the shift key is a lost cause that will never ever ever work.


I love when you goto apple's onlice support and type in the serial number it says you have to pay to talk to someone in order to get a direct answer on what the problem is. I wish I could find some help because the nearest apple store is a three hour drive north or a three hour drive south to the coast. If you ask me, how do I like these apples... I will tell you crappentosh! Thanks to Pro Tools having a ton of compatibility issues with LION, has stopped me from making the mistake of upgrading to lion.


If anybody can help me with my brothers macbook pro 15 inch 2.5g-ram please tell me how you solved this issue. I would like to know how to boot into safe mode when obviously the shift key does not work.

Jan 28, 2012 5:40 AM in response to Windblows and Crapentosh

Hi there,


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. If the Apple web site says your brother's Mac is out of warranty, it probably means it is older than three months and he elected not to buy the additional AppleCare coverage plan, but depending on the actual age of his Mac, he may still have time to purchase additional warranty coverage. I strongly urge your brother to buy an AppleCare warranty on his computer. He can do that by calling Apple or probably online with his credit card. Also, if your brother lost the boot disk and the disk with the iLife software on it, he can request a replacement for a nominal fee from Apple. I am not sure, but I think the fee is $10 US, or thereabouts.


You can try booting off the built-in Lion rescue disk by holding down the Option key while starting your borther's MacBook Pro to see if that helps.


If you have any further problems with it, I suggest you post a new thread on this forum or the MacBook Pro forum, depending on the problem. It is considered poor form to tack a new problem onto an existing thread.

Does safe mode work in Lion?

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