Will not boot into Safe Mode

> … transparency of bug tracking …

Please, what's the number for your bug report?

I honestly don't know but less than ten min. I walked to the kitchen when I saw the progress bar. When I got back ten min later I was surprised to be at the login screen already. Sorry for the imprecise but true answer.

Dave, I understand and share a lot of your frustration. But I have been a Mac user since the very very beginning and I must say that Apple's support is way better nowadays than in the 80s, 90s and even up to 4-5 years ago. Under System 7 everyone had a copy of Norton disk doctor or knew of someone who did. 7.5 would crash or freeze up daily. Yes Mac OS X 10.0 wasn't great but everyone knew that they where early adopters and did most critical work under 9.1 back then. I think my worst disappointment with OSX was 10.3.0 which broke tons of critical things. I actually think 10.8 is really good for an .2 version. File bug reports!

(What I'm trying to say is that Apples overall support with AppleCare, in-store help, providing software tools (boot partition, disk utility, documentation), and hosting this forum, along with acting on formal bug reports is just as good or better than the competition. Having a repair utility software at hand is a must, like having a spare tyre in the car or home insurance. Yes, if all we did was to run a non-Admin account with iApps that came with the computer then we could demand flawless operation. But I'm running apps from all over the place, have replace RAM and hard drive, haven't done a proper re-install from scratch in 12+ years but transferred all kinds of legacy junk from machine to machine (files from the 80s, apps that absolutely will never ever run...). Just my 2 pathetic cents for whatever it's worth...)

Thank you Peter,

I will keep 15 minutes as a safe long enough period to try.

After that I will kill it.

Jan

> … boot up with all the command line garbage showing …

Probably not garbage. Verbosity.

Mac OS X: How to start up in single-user or verbose mode

If you can't recall how you saved (to NVRAM) the preference for verbosity at every start up, then a simple reset will cause future starts to be not verbose.

About NVRAM and PRAM

> … Has anybody tried to reset the SMC yet? …

Yes, more than once, with no improvement.

Hi Peter. I can imagine that 10.8 is better than 7.5 and that Apple may have actually improved their bug handling process.

I personally came to MacOS in 2006 after 10 years using only Linux. I was never really a Windows user other than casually to play the odd game.

I won't attempt to compare the Linux user experience to that of MacOS. Apple has demonstrated a clear aptitude here, not in small part due to the centralised control of consistency. Apple have also been at various times during the last 6 years very supportive of their developer community in providing excellent tools and tutorial resources for developers.

It is probably due to the quality this developmental phase support, and my own experiences with the necessarily high quality of open source project bug tracking, that I am so unimpressed with Apple's abysmal pre-release testing and post-release fault remediation.

They do provide very attentive "expert" services in-store. So the perception of customer support is high. Its the substance thats lacking, and the enablement of the user in helping themselves through timely contribution a to publicly accessible bug tracker of the standard typical on sites like Sourceforge for well over a decade.

My $0.02.

Well, weird as it is, It has something to see with RAM. I cleared PRAM 4 times and rebuilt the directory with Diskwarrior. Nada. I still couldn't boot in safe mode.

Then, I removed one of my DIMMs. And the MacPro started in safe mode for the first time in ages.

After several combinations, I've found that I have to leave one RAM slot empty. Now I have seven 2GB DIMMs in slots 1 to 7 and the 8th is empty. Of those DIMMs, 4 of the are the Apple originals (Hynix). The otjer 3... well, I don't remember the brand, but they are third parety RAM.

MacPro 5.1 mid 2010. 10.8.2 Formerly, 15GB of RAM, now 14GB of RAM.

Good for you, so I tried it too.

My failing initial configuration:

2*2 (Apple) + 2*4 (Kingston)

So I tried:

2*4 (Kingston) - no Safe Boot

1*2 (Apple) + 1*4 (Kingston) - no Safe Boot

2*2 (Apple) + 1*4 (Kingston) - no Safe Boot

So in my case it didn't work.

27 inch iMac (2011) running 10.8.2

It spontaneously started and stopped showing this all by itself.

Having the same problem on my Macbook Pro MC723, safe mode boot freezes at 25%.

So that doesn't depend on RAM vendor and its' amount. I've replaced my Crucial 2*4 Gb modules with original 2*2 Gb modules and still can't boot in safe mode.

For what it's worth, I can pile on here. Same problem. Pressing Shift to enter safe mode gets me stuck at ~25% of the way thru the boot. I've done the 'nvram boot-args="-x -v"' to get into verbose safe mode and the system hangs at the fsck_hfs : Checking extended attributes file. I've run recovery and single user mode manual fsck_hfs to see if the drive has issues and nothing is wrong according to fsck... Disk Utility (From a recovery boot) says the volume is fine as well.

I'm running 10.8.2 on a early 2011 MBP (i7 quad, 2Ghz) with 8G of memory.

Normal boot works, but something is still wrong if safe mode won't boot...

I have the distinct feeling that Apple is addressing this problem in their operating system software development team's work.

I have just re-installed Mac OS X Mountain Lion again from scratch (Macbook Air mid-2012 8GB), and safe mode still doesn't work. It doesn't have anything to do with the RAM, since I haven't touched anything from when I bought it, and therefore I think that it must be a problem with the operating system itself. Hopefully they will send out an update soon to address the issue.