Can't boot after installing 10.8.3

I installed 10.8.3 today on all the Macs in the house using the Combo updater. Everything went ok on the 2011 Mini, 2012 13" Macbook Pro, 2012 (I think) Macbook Air, and 2009 17" Macbook Pro. But on my early 2011 17" Macbook Pro with 8GB of RAM and 2.2Ghz Core i7, it's been a nightmare. The install seemed to go fine, but when I rebooted after a while on the grey sreen with the spinner and Apple logo the Apple turned to the prohibitory sign (the circle with the slash through it), and there it gets stuck. I've tried with no luck:

1) boot to a recovery partition, and ran both a repair and repair permission on the drive in Disk Utility. Neither found any issues.

2) reset the NVRAM/PRAM several times

3) when I tried to boot into verbose Safe mode, after a little while a message appeard, "Still waiting for root device" and the circle with the slash through it appeared in the middle of the screen. After a few mintues, the message appears again. And it just sits there spitting that message out for long minutes.

4) after I tried safe boot and it failed, I wiped the drive, installed a clean copy of 10.8 on it, and then installed nothing but the 10.8.3 update. Rebooted and the same problem.

After the clean install and update failed, I wiped the drive again and restored 10.8.2 from Time Machine, which is where I am now and it's working and booting fine. As an experiment, I cloned the boot drive to an external hard drive, rebooted off the extenral drive, and installed 10.8.3 there. And that works. I can boot from the firewire drive with 10.8.3 on it just fine. So it seems to me that it's having a problem with my boot drive, which is an Intel X25M 160GB SSD. I'd greatly appreciate any help because this has been driving me nuts all day.

The strange thing is that now that I've restored back to 10.8.2, 10.8.3 no longer shows up for me in Software Update. It showed up on the other 2 Macbook Pros. Has Apple maybe pulled it from Software Update for my model MBP because of the problems?