MacOS – Mac Pro gets stuck in “safe mode” after Lion upgrade

macossafe-mode

Late 2009 Mac Pro, 8GB RAM, 1TB disk.

I upgraded to Lion about a month ago. Running 10.7.1 now. Things started getting unbearably slow (windows slow to scroll), can't switch between programs without a long pause, etc.) Nothing obvious is running (checked ActivityMonitor, CPU is largely idle).

Some Googling suggested running Disk Utility to repair permissions. I did that, it finished quickly and without issue. For good measure I decided to reboot in safe mode and let it do a disk repair.

But it never gets past about the 10% mark in whatever it's doing when it enters safe mode (I just have the gray progress bar and spinner.) I let it run for about 4 hours and it didn't budge. I powered it off, repeated, and same deal- always gets stuck in the same place in safe mode.

Any suggestions on what could be wrong? The disk is large (1TB), but only 357GB in use. Should I let it run overnight? I miss the good old days when Unix kernels would print gobs of messages to the console, so you could at least figure out what it's doing.

Update: so I re-ran Disk Utility and got the following:

disk utilityhttp://i.imgur.com/aG66g.png

I don't have physical media for Lion, so I'm not sure what to do here. Can I do a disk repair from a Snow Leopard DVD?

Update 2: Booted into the recover partition with Cmd-R. Ran the recovery successfully, system boots, it's fine.

But if I try safe mode it still hangs. Booting Cmd-V shows a quick fsck, then it boots up normally, so I can't see any problems there. It just seems to hang in safe mode.

Update 3: Booted single-user, ran fsck -fy as suggested by bmike. I let it run overnight, and it found no problems. Interestingly, I do get:

E:[AppleUSBBluetoothHCIController][InterruptedReadHandler] Received kIOUSBHighSpeedSplitError error

on the console when I powered on my monitor. It repeats if I power-cycle the monitor. I have a USB Bluetooth wireless plugged into that monitor (which is in turn plugged into the Macpro's USB).

The USB-Bluetooth is there because my Macpro's internal Bluetooth arrived non-functional from the factory 2 years ago, and I gave up with Apple customer service on getting it repaired. I settled for the USB-Bluetooth plug to handle my bluetooth mouse.

I wonder if having this USB-Bluetooth is somehow causing the Safe Mode hang.

Best Answer

Boot to single user mode (Command-S) and see what fsck shows.

  • /sbin/fsck -fy
  • repeat the prior up to three times if needed

Assuming it boots, you can halt and then boot in verbose mode (Command-V) to restore all the console glory.

You can also peek at /private/var/log/system.log while on single user mode to see what was happening when the clock was passing faster than the gray progress bar.

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