Mac Pro new update won't boot after 10.8.2 Update 1.0

Reinstalling Lion/Mountain Lion Without Erasing the Drive

Boot to the Recovery HD: Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.

Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions: Upon startup select Disk Utility from the main menu. Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions as follows.

When the recovery menu appears select Disk Utility. After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list. In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive. If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the main menu.

Reinstall Lion/Mountain Lion: Select Reinstall Lion/Mountain Lion and click on the Continue button.

Note: You will need an active Internet connection. I suggest using Ethernet if possible because it is three times faster than wireless.

Do yourself a favor, get in the habit of cloning your system before updates, doing a safe boot before applying updates can also help.

Impossible to know why though, the number of "this update left my system unbootable" are so common and yet inconclusive more than 90% of the time.

http://www.bombich.com/software/updates/ccc-3.5.html

OS X Lion Install to Different Drive

How to create an OS X Lion installation disc MacFixIt

I had a similar problem - MBP hung on the gray boot screen (before apple logo shows). I booted into Disk Utility which told me I had a corrupt drive. So I repaired the drive. Problem solved

When the computer starts and you hear the Mac tone at boot up hold down the shift key until you see the apple logo with spinning pinwheel then release. The computer will do one of two things, boot up in safe mode or restart. If it boots up in safe mode the. Restart the computer and you're fine. If it just reboots then you will get a box saying that you have updates to install. Make sure you install whatever it says and then it will shut down. Press the power button and you will be good to go.

Really? A system reinstall is the "final answer". Can I phone a friend or ask the audience? 😝

I completely understand the argument for backups -- I've been presching it for years. Unfortunately for me, my MacPro5,1 with 4 2TB drives is the backup server! I also had just gotten a corporate SSL cert installed (want pain, try asking Windows PKI guys how to figure this out!) and was able able to finally get SUS working on the same day. Then I see "10.8.2 Supplemental Update" and installed since it was required. It seemed to apply correctly but after 96 hours, my server still has a spinning circle/Apple logo.

Here's what I've tried so far:

• Disconnect all peripherals: had only wired mouse, keyboard and monitor attached. Won't boot.
• Safe mode boot: I see a progress bar at the bottom of the screen get to about 33% and disappear. Still won't boot.
• Recovery partition: I can run Disk Util from recovery. I get/fix disk permissions every time (up to 4 times in a row) and "check" says disk is okay. Still won't boot.
• Reset NVRAM/PRAM: I think I heard the computer laugh at me. Still won't boot.
• Sing-user mode: ran `fsck -fy`. Disk reports back as okay. Still won't boot.
• Tried googling a download for Apple Repair Tools...nowhere to be found for this model.
• Opened system and reset all RAM DIMMS, dusted out system, read it "I'll love you forever". Won't boot even slower than before. Laughing starting to sound sinister.

Unsure where to go at this point so I welcome suggestions OTHER than rebuild... Thanks.

What we do and strongly recommend is using CCC to clone the system and keep the system on a small OS (and app only) boot drive.

A working 2nd boot drive, with the last good system

You can also make a sparse disk image of the system volume which should really not be bigger than say 300GB at the very extreme - most find it is more like 30 or 70GB range.

Thanks hatter, I bought a copy of CCC and will most definetly use this moving forward.

I opened a support case with Apple and have resolved the issue! After describing the above, I was asked to perform an SMC reset which did not work. After consulting with a senior agent, we tried the following after booting into single user mode

/sbin/mount <default command shown on console>

chmod 1755 /

chmod –RN /

reboot

For whatever reason, ACLs appeared to be incorrect and this fixed it. Server is up and running now. I'll back it up with CCC and reboot.

BTW, it was recommended that I also boot into Recovery, check/fix the disk then check/fix permissions.

Thanks. Years ago it use to be 'recommended' by many of us to repair permissions first and then update. Updating without a clone of current system has always had risks. In the past I could clone and then apply the update to the other drive while not booted from it. Very handy. No more though.

Also use to be a truism to only use combo update and if the delta update did not work then use the combo.

Not being able to apply combo from another drive limits some troubleshooting - so that you use to be able to apply changes and updates while having a good bootable drive to use.

Repair from Recovery should always be a #1 followed by a Safe Boot as well.

PS: I really think sometimes zapping PrAM or SMC reset can be over-prescribed and not even called for as the problem is software or elsewhere. Removing hardware yes.

Oh, and a restart before applying updates will always be safer route. Maybe even do a Safe Boot then too. (Another old trick was to run AppleJack before applying update in order to rebuild system caches and to repair permission).

Couldn't agree more with the truisms. Hadn't heard of AppleJack so thanks for that tip. But it seems like AJ isn't certified for Lion or ML. Is there a comparable tool? Feel free to PM me any more utils like that if you don't mind.

Thanks again for your help. Cheers.

www.macupdate.com

I own Panther Cache Cleaner (which became Tiger etc ) and he is always on top of OS changes and will have an update just before an update hits the servers. I never did but Onyx has its own following. Some are on the "to be avoided list" though. And CCleaner is more a port from Windows but seems safe but is not 100-feature swiss army knife.

AJ was perfect - give it to people to invoke if needed and let it run. But the transition from PPC to Intel (we bought him a Mini to test on) and don't know about Lion+ but seems likely.

Another essential, and still around and now commercial and not "share/free"ware is CCC and very must save yours and everyone's bacon if used properly.