MacOS – Troubleshooting MacBook Air boot issues

bootmacbook promacos

I have a late-2010 MacBook Air (11inch, 3,1), running Snow Leopard. I hadn't run software update in a month or two, so I plugged it into the wall and ran software update last night. Unfortunately, the update failed, giving the informative message "An error occurred." Nothing happened for an hour or so after this, so I forced a restart.

Now the MBA won't boot up at all. It hangs on the grey screen, with the little grey wheel spinning forever. I was wondering what additional steps I should take before bringing it in to the apple store? I've already:

  1. Booted from the provided USB drive and repaired permissions. Permissions repair finds lots of SUID issues it can't repair, but I guess I can ignore these.
  2. Booted from the provided USB drive and run disk utility. It runs without issues.
  3. Re-installed Snow Leopard from the USB drive.
  4. Re-set PRAM
  5. Re-set the PMC
  6. Ran the apple hardware test (the short one, not the long one) from the USB drive. Everything passed.

None of these procedures fixed the issue. Ominously, when I try to boot in single user mode, this also fails. It displays lots of errors messages, and never actually gets to a command prompt.

Have there been any recent firmware updates for the 3,1 macbook airs? It doesn't seem to be a software problem, but I'm stumped, and any help is appreciated.

Thank you.

Edit: Here's what the screen looks like:
Gray Screen

Edit 2: I did a "Safe Boot" and that appears to hang too. Here's the last few lines of output:

fsck_hfs: Volume is journaled. No checking performed
fsck_hfs: Use the -f option to force checking
launchctl: Please convert the following to launchd: /etc/mach_init.d/dashboardadvisory.plist
systemShutdown false
AppleMCP89TMS::powerGatingDown(0): Done

and nothing more for over an hour now.

Best Answer

You can try the following steps :

  1. Backup all your data
  2. Perform a clean install from the Apple-provided USB drive (boot from the drive, choose your language, then go in the utilities -> Disk Utility. There, you can re-create a new partition in order to eliminate drive partitionning problems).
  3. quit the utility and re-install SL

If nothing helps, that probably means that the mac encountered a hardware problem.

Perhaps you could post here the error messages you encounter in single user mode, that could help understand the problem.

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