Startup freeze after migrating to new i7 iMac

Apr 08, '11 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: azrichg

Hopefully this will same someone out there some time and hair pulling. I was migrating from a 2x2 Xeon @ 3ghz to a new i7 iMac. After Migration and restarting the iMac started freezing before getting to the blue screen. Since Apple couldn't get a support call to me right away I decided to do some poking around. Using Safe Mode booting and removing start up items I found the problem.

Since my understanding of the OSX system is very limited, this took me a long time to work out. Anyone with a sense of how OSX works probably would have known what to do immediately.

The system was hanging right after the Apple logo appeared and the spinner finished its spinning long after the start up chime. Instead of going blue, then to the desktop the screen stayed white. The first time I got the curtain of gray with a 'I need to restart my computer' message in several languages every time at this point. [crarko adds: We call this a Kernel Panic in Mac land.]

The computer DID boot up in 'Safe Boot' mode (holding the Shift key down) fine. I used a USB keyboard as I didn't trust the Bluetooth setup so I can't swear that it'll work with a BT keyboard.

I suspected there were some startup items that didn't work with my new system, but what I didn't understand why is this an issue before I log in? The only startup items that I was aware of existed in the user preferences, and this hang was before any user was logged in. So I searched around for start up items and found /Library/Startupitems/Resources which had a few items in it. For whatever reason there is another Startupitems folder at /System/Library/Startupitems which is empty. I moved the items from the /Library/Startupitems/Resources folder to a temporary folder on my desktop and hit Restart.

With fingers crossed (and eyes too) I selected 'Restart' and the computer booted fine! Slowly I added items back to the folder and restarted. Now I have everything back except for all Cocktail related items, and a folder BRESINKx86Monitoring which was part of a CPU temp monitoring app I had.

Like I said, my understanding of OSX is that of a user, so I might be mistaken as to how/why this all worked. It took me a while to figure it out, but since my old system was fine and I had time there was nothing to lose. The fact that the OS has folders labelled 'startupitems' really helped. IIRC searching for 'startupitems' didn't work in safe boot, so I was looking around on my own.

[crarko adds: I post this, not because it's going to be new information for the veteran Mac user (most of us have been through things like this) but as a reminder of what the new Mac user may experience, since we have a lot of them. I'm hoping some of the more experienced members will continue to provide good advice for the beginner. I'll also put in a plug for the MacOSXhints forums as a place for new users to go with troubleshooting questions and more in-depth answers.]

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