OS X Lion won't start up in safe mode

Same/similar problem here: MacBook Pro started freezing up a lot, out of the blue, and now won't boot up even in Safe Mode; hangs about 1/4 - 1/3 of the way through. Have tried zapping PRAM, etc., have tried booting off other hard drive, no dice. Apple, HELP!!

I ended up buying diskwarrior, burning a boot disk and letting it rebuild the disk. Fixed the safe mode issues.

"Rebuild the disk"? Rebuild the directory? Was your disk encrypted?

Also, did Disk Warrior flag any problems?

Frankly, I can't tell you at this point. I told it to rebuild whatever it could - got the deluxe treatment, and now it boots like a champ.

I had a similar experience with my drive not booting. Disk Utility was unable to fix, and the Genius Bar said reformat and restore from Time Machine. I did not want to wipe my drive and put all my faith in Time Machine when I knew that likely all of my data was still intact, so I got Disk Warrior on it and it fixed it. I still have Time Machine running but I also plan on doing a Carbon Copy Clone or at least a Disk Utility copy regularly to another (third) drive.

I tried DW again and again and it never solved this for me. I finally gave up and manually reinstalled everything into a new account. Obviously that worked, but it was a pain bc I have tons of stuff to reconfigure, but at least it rules out a hardware problem in my case. Good luck.

Same here. OS X 10.8.2, safe mode boot hangs about 25% through. I did a rebuild with DiskWarrior, and it fixed some directory problems, but I still cannot boot into safe mode. I hope 10.8.3 comes soon and fixes this.

Like some others, I went and bought Disk Warrior and it worked:

1. I installed it (dropped into /Applications)
2. Force Time Machine to back up again (just to be sure).
3. Kicked off my nightly Carbon Copy Cloner scheduled job (Command-S to get to scheduled jobs)
4. Rebooted and held ALT
5. Selected my CCC cloned drive
6. Ran Disk Warrior
7. Selected 'Directory'
8. Selected my normal boot drive.
9. Clicked Rebuild

When it was done it found a few problems:

• 24 files had a directory entry with an incorrect text encoding value that was repaired.
• 103 folders had a directory entry with an incorrect custom icon flag that was repaired.
• Incorrect values in the Volume Information were repaired.

I suspect the incorrect text incoding or the Volume Information were the problems.

If someone is still having this problem, I wonder if there is a way to reset or repair just the Volume Information or detect file encoding...

You could try find / -regex '[^a-zA-Z0-9.@#$%^&*()_+{}|\~-]' to find non-ascii characters.

As for many others, I couldn't boot into Safe Mode and I took it to the Genius Bar. They ran Drive Genius and it had no effect. They wanted to keep it for a few days but I use my computer to run my business so I took it back. They also suggested that I reformat the drive and reinstall everything!

I purchased Disk Warrior instead. It flagged some items and I let it rebuild the directory. Everything works fine now—without reformmating the disk!

This happened to me too. My computer cannot boot in safe mode! I let the computer run for 2 hours now. When will this get fixed?!?!

Same problem here on Mac with OS X 10.8.3 (Mountain Lion).

Safe boot freezes at less than 1/3 of progress bar.

DiskWarrior 4.4 from booting PenDrive USB 3 fixed it (Incorrect values in the Volume Information were repaired).

Amazing!

Am experiencing this problem right now. Won't boot normally or in safe mode. The best I can do is get to "Restore Mode" where I have tried DiskUtility a few times and not getting any better performance.

I'm tyring to avoid rebuilding from TimeMachine. If I purchase DiskWarrior, will that bypass this issue and allow me to try repairs or is this something I needed previously?