Mountain Lion won't boot after restart (SSD problem?)

There was only one aluminum MacBook released, and it was the late 2008 version.

If it helps:

Macbook pro unibody, late 2008

ocz octane ssd 256gb

Working fine with lion. Not booting after installing mountain lion.

Reinstalling didn't solve the problem.

Manage to boot in safe mode > run pilot in Cocktail, cleaning system caches, and then reboot > It hangs in the spinning wheel. Force quit and then switching on, allows the machine to start properly and work well.

Force quit must always be performed when the computer stop on the spinning wheel.

Works every time.

Hey Xanano,

You totally nailed it.

My drive is also an OCZ Octane SSD 256GB, so your response caught my eye. I ran Pilot in Cocktail 6.0 before another attempt at upgrading to Mountain Lion. After installation, the system once again went into a continuous reboot cycle (grey screen and spinning asterisk, restarting about every minute). I then manually restarted while holding the Shift key, to get into safe mode. (I'm explaining more than would normally be necessary to help Mac newbies.) After the safe reboot I again ran Pilot in Cocktail. I then restarted and it hung again on grey screen, with the spinning asterisk. I did a force quit (Control + Shift plus Power On) and after restarting I saw the login screen almost instantly, thanks to the SSD's speed. As you said, works every time. Many thanks!

This sounds to be a pretty weird workaround. The fact many SSD and HDD drives are affected leads me to the optinion this is not a OCZ problem only. Does the community have any indications APPLE is working on that as well?

I have a MBP 8,2 (early 2011) with an OCZ SSD. After the initial, successful upgrade to Mountain Lion yesterday, I powered down after 24-hours. When I powered up, I couldn't boot to the main drive. Safe mode works as well as recovery mode.

I reinstalled Mountain Lion via recovery and it did not resolve the problem. Unfortunately, I'm having unrelated issues connecting to my Time Machine to reload (about a month old) a backup using Lion.

I may migrate my files onto the original HDD that came with my MBP and run off of that. Safe mode is kind of lame.

EDIT: removed redundant information

So far there has been no comment from Apple regarding this issue. OCZ have locked off all threads concerning this and have just put up a notice that they are working on the problem. Obviously a fair rew people are concerned about this and for my 2c this appears to be more of an OS issue, after all 99% of these drives were working perfectly under Lion.

You don't have to stay in safe mode. When you start up if you get the spinning wheel constantly. Just restart again, by holding down Command-Shift-Power, this often allows you to boot as normal, but this only works AFTER you get the constant spinning wheel on boot.

is it CMD/Shift/Power or Ctrl/Shift/Power? and what is the difference to just hold the Power button?

Try this it seems to work for quite a few people.

Boot into safe mode (Hold Shift after the chime)

Open the Terminal app, and type (without the quotes): "sudo rm -f /private/var/db/BootCache.playlist"

Reboot with verbose (Hold CMD+V after the chime)

It will probably freeze at "BootCache.playlist: 2 No such file or directory". When it does, reboot again.

Thankfully my machine eventually booted into ML after re-installing it and a shutdown or 2. I haven't risked shutting it down since. So I havent tried the above.

I'd just like to reiterate that I have the same problem and I don't have an OCZ drive; I upgraded my drive to a larger drive that's not even SSD, and it was working well with Lion. So, no, it's not OCZ's issue. It's Apple's.

(To Apple's credit, they gave me a full refund for Mountain Lion without any hassles.)

The person I am replying to is correct, this is NOT an OCX problem, it is an Apple problem, as even though I have NOT yet had the specific problem listed here, I have had other problems trying to Format my Hard Drive when using Disk Utility in 10.8 Recovery so that I can clean install Mac OS X Mountain Lion and I do NOT have an OCX Hard Drive (as far as I know). I am an Apple Developer and the issue that I describe occurred in all 4 Mountain Lion Developer Previews and now is affecting me in Gold Master/Public Release as well. Just FYI.

Then the person who said that he had a 2011 Alunimum Mac Book was most likely mistaken as to what type of Mac he has. He probably has a Warrentied Late 2008 Alunimum Mac Book who thought it was 2011 NOT realizing that Apple gives you a Refubised Mac of the same Make and Model of the Original Purchase as long as its still in stock when you need to have the Mac Replaced.

It booted normally after I reinstalled Mountain Lion in recovery mode and slept while it was doing this. I will not be rebooting if I can help it.

Regardless of whether it's Apple or OCZ's problem, it really is my problem at the moment as this is my only notebook computer. I do have a plan B of moving my data onto my old HDD, but it seems like this isn't a guaranteed fix.

I also don't think this is an Ocz issue.

Could this be a issue with non Apple hardware (hdd or ssd)?

(corection to my previous post: i do not make a force quit as described here. I just hold the power button until de computer shuts of).

@corncad

I know, I have the same problem. Using my mac for business I already lost almost a day getting it back to life. Luckily I use a SSD as system and a 750GB HDD as data drive so none of my data left the planet, but I fear starting into the next business day since I do not know if I can rely on my laptop anymore. One of the reasons I switched to mac years ago was the stability of the systems. If the problem was present since the early developer previews, I doubt there will be a "quick fix". Thinking to pull my spare HP out of the box ...