A good friend of mine got a new MacBook. She lives on a remote Spanish island, and I have only Chat contact with her right now.
She unpacked the MacBook (a pro 15-inch from this year) and walked through the first steps of the installation process. Apparently after choosing her installation language, a grey screen with a clock or throbber icon turned up. It's been there for an hour now, with no signs of actual activity (like HDD sounds). I asked her to do a hard reset (Using Ctrl + Command + Power button); this boots the machine up, but leads back to the same grey screen.
I now asked her to do a reboot into Safe Mode, which Apple recommend in their knowledge base as the next step.
It doesn't seem normal for the installation procedure. It also seems terribly unlikely that the HDD would break right at that moment, doesn't it? She is totally distraught and has nobody to help her there. Does anybody have any idea what to do, short of bringing the machine to an Apple store, which there probably isn't one on the Island.
Best Answer
In verbose mode, I managed to find out that the Macbook's boot process froze at some point in the boot process. We were unable to find out why exactly - the last message logged was a complaint from SSH that it can't create a socket, which according to Apple's support resources is owed to an not yet existing internet connection.
We tried all reset steps (Safe boot; Verbose boot; PRAM/NVRAM reset; SMC reset) without success, but we managed to reinstall OS X from the DVD and it seems to be running fine now.