Chosen Solution
Today my 2010 Macbook Pro 13" running Lion suddenly stopped booting up and remained stuck on the Apple logo and spinning wheel indefinitely. It does not even go to the login screen (but does in certain circumstances as I will detail below) Here is a list of things I have tried already! Hold Shift to boot into safe mode: The progress bar goes about halfway and then stops and goes back to the spinning wheel again. Hold Cmd and R to go to Disk Utility: In the Disk Utility I repaired and verified permissions and the disk and the results come up as OK. Hold Option to select drive: When I do this, and select Macintosh HD, it takes me to the login screen and I can enter my password, however upon doing so it brings me to a crashed Chrome, which gives me the option to Restore previous tabs. Nothing else loads and a grey screen remains in the background. No dock or desktop or Finder appears or works. I can get into System Preferences, however I can’t connect to my Wifi network even though it is detected. I can connect to Wifi when I am in the Cmd and R Disk Utility mode though. Resetting PRAM/NVRAM and SMC: I have tried these and none of them make any difference to the problem. I would appreciate it if anyone else has any ideas I could try.
You’ll need to boot under your recover DVD in order to run disk utility again from the DVD to fix the boot sectors and any format corruptions. Do you have a good backup? if not get an external HD of equal or bigger size than your internal (firewire is best) and after booting from the DVD you should be able to copy your current files from your HD over to the external HD (do a full copy by dragging the HD icon over to the external HD). Once your backup’ed you could try reformatting the internal HD and then install a new copy of OS-X on the HD then copy back your files using the migration tool to restore from the external HD backup. Don’t forget to run ‘Software Update’ before recovering your files so all of the security updates are on your system first. As of late Mac has been hit with some malware attacks, it’s now time to start being more aggressive running anti-virus (malware) software. Make sure you are and your files are OK. At this point you should be OK You still may have problems with Chrome after restoring as it appears it’s files are corrupted. Delete the App library files under the user account and you may also need to re-install the app it’s self. I would recommend creating a few different user accounts, use one everyday and one just in case (admin) just make sure this one has a password that you won’t forget. Use this admin account when you get into trouble.
