OS X :: Can't Change Start Up Disk Due To "building Boot Caches Failure"
Sep 27, 2009
my Mac Pro 2008 runs Snow Leopard 10.6.1 on a striped software RAID and Windows XP using Bootcamp on a separate hard drive.
Initially that separate hard drive had been split into two partitions, one for Time Machine and one for Windows. But eventually I decided to get rid of the Time Machine partition and dedicate the entire hard drive to Windows.
I've done that but there appeared a strange problem. In System Preferences my startup disk was set to Windows and now I'm unable to change it to Mac OS X anymore. (Please see the screenshot below).
Of course I can select Mac OS X while holding "Alt" on boot, but having Windows a default OS on Mac Pro is very disturbing
I have no idea what is "boot helper partition" and what's wrong with it. I'm afraid that Windows installer (I had to use it while transforming the partition) messed something up.
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May 13, 2012
Macbook Pro won't boot. Symptoms preceding failure included failure to open Firefox. When trying to cold boot I can get as far as the start-up sound, the Apple logo, and the spinning whieel (spins for a bit but not for very long) and then major failure. Not running Liom.
Info:
imac 10.1, Mac OS X (10.6.2), also have macbook pro running os 10.5
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May 24, 2009
I'm running 10.5.7 and Boot camp - is there any way to force my Mac to always ask which disk to start up without always having to hold the option key?
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Feb 5, 2010
I have a Mac Pro in which i installed a 300 gig velociraptor along with the stock 320 gig HD. It would obviously make more sense to use this Velociraptor as the boot disk, so how would I transfer the info from the 320 gig hard drive to the velociraptor and change it to be the boot disk?
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Aug 30, 2009
I recently installed windows 7 (7001) on a new drive (750gb) and re-formatted my old windows 7 drive (80gb) to be used as a backup for OS X. After that the windows boot drive was not available at start-up. Here is how it went:
original set up:
HD (os x)
Windows drive (80gb)
after new drive:
HD (os x)
windows drive (80gb and 750gb) I had windows 7 installed on both drives and at windows boot was given two choices of windows 7.
This worked fine until I reformatted the old 80gb drive to be a second mac drive and at start-up the windows boot drive was not visible only HD (os x). The windows drive is still visible on the os x desktop (all files are visible) but not under "disk startup" in the preferences pane.
current set-up:
HD (os x)
mac backup (80gb)
windows 7 (750gb) not bootable
I tried booting from windows 7 disk to repair but it does not recognize any bootable windows drive. Should I go through bootcamp utility to repair the windows drive?
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Jul 14, 2010
Have had boot camp working just how I wanted it (default boot into W7) since day 1, but have just had a problem! All of a sudden, the MBP boots into OSX by default. If I hold option (alt), I do have the option to boot into windows, but under disk utility in OSX, it cant see my W7 partition! Even when I boot into W7 manually, boot camp control panel only has OSX as the only boot disk! I have searched and returned a few instances of this, but all have the complication of people using NTFS tools, I havnt done that.
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Apr 5, 2009
Is there any way I can boot up my external hard drive as a start up disk along with my internal hard drive?
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Mar 9, 2008
Yesterday my screen (30" Apple Cinema) started showing symptoms of graphics card failure, jagged lines across the screen. I rebooted my Mac Pro and it was gone. Then it happened again an hour later, this time the machine didn't boot, I get the Apple logo, and then it hangs up and the screen is shifted to left (I get apple logo on left side of the monitor instead of the middle) and jagged lines all over.
So the first thing I tested was using Target Disk Mode, it works. I can access my Mac Pro's internal HD's by TDM from my MacBook Pro. Then I tested single user mode, it does boot, I can't read what's written since the screen is shifted to left, but if I type (without seeing) reboot and hit enter, it reboots. So I assume the single user mode is working.
What else can I try to 100% make sure it's my graphics card that failed and everything else is ok with Mac Pro? I already ordered a graphics card replacement but I wouldn't like to be surprised if the Mac Pro still doesn't boot when the card arrives. It won't boot from Apple Startup DVD either. Same thing happens, gray logo then kernel panic with jagged lines all across the shifted screen.
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Oct 2, 2009
Yesterday my screen (30" Apple Cinema) started showing symptoms of graphics card failure, jagged lines across the screen. I rebooted my Mac Pro and it was gone. Then it happened again an hour later, this time the machine didn't boot, I get the Apple logo, and then it hangs up and the screen is shifted to left (I get apple logo on left side of the monitor instead of the middle) and jagged lines all over.
So the first thing I tested was using Target Disk Mode, it works. I can access my Mac Pro's internal HD's by TDM from my MacBook Pro. Then I tested single user mode, it does boot, I can't read what's written since the screen is shifted to left, but if I type (without seeing) reboot and hit enter, it reboots. So I assume the single user mode is working.
What else can I try to 100% make sure it's my graphics card that failed and everything else is ok with Mac Pro? I already ordered a graphics card replacement but I wouldn't like to be surprised if the Mac Pro still doesn't boot when the card arrives.
P.S. It won't boot from Apple Startup DVD either. Same thing happens, gray logo then kernel panic with jagged lines all across the shifted screen.
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Apr 23, 2010
Every time I restart my macbook it will take me to a blue screen and the mouse pointer will be in the top left hand corner of the screen. It will not start in safe mode. I've done the "fsck -f" I don't have a the snow leopard disk any longer, but I can of course obtain another if it is the only way to fix this problem. I'm at college, the disk is at home 8 hours away..and I want on my computer now. Sorry for my lack of intelligence concerning this issue as well as the OSX as a whole, this is my first Mac and I love it!
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Apr 29, 2008
I've just purchased a Netgear wireless router and have fallen at the first hurdle of trying to install the software. I have a MacBook 10.4.10.When I load up the CD I can see all the files the installation disk contains but the various autorun files ask me to specify the program I want to open them with. There's a help file for Mac users that recommends I install a Joliet Volume Access extension, but this is for Mac OS 7-9, as my version apparently already contains it, or something similar, that should allow me to run it immediately.
As you can probably tell, I am an immense retard when it comes to computers and am therefore entirely lost amongst hybrid CD creators and programs calledCDEveryWhere, etc etc.
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Dec 11, 2008
The string of problems I've encountered started a few days ago. I normally let my imac go to sleep by itself but, on this occasion I told it to sleep via the apple menu. When I awoke the imac the screen was frozen. No mouse movement, no clock movement, nothing. At this point I turned the power off and back on again. It didn't get past the white screen (before the gray with apple logo). I then tried resetting the PRAM, booting in safe mode, and booting from my os disc. Nothing worked.
After several tens of tries it magically booted. It stayed active long enough for me to back up all my data (transferring at least 100GB), reformat the hdd, reinstall leapord, transfer data back, and use it until I let it sleep again.
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Dec 29, 2008
I have a g4 1.5 powerbook that I use everyday.Today I went to turn it on and all I am getting on the start up is the Apple symbol and the hourglass circle that just keeps spinning. I am pretty sure the hard disc is the problem. Bc, I can't hear it spinning.
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Oct 4, 2009
OK, so I did something truly stupid. I managed to splash water on my macbook. I hit a small cup of water (about 2 oz) with the end of the computer with the CD drive. It immediately shut off. The next day, I set it outside to dry in the sun and by midday, all was well. It functioned just as it always had. This continued through last night. This morning, when powering on, all I got was a white screen (no tone). After doing powering up while holding command-alt-r-t (a sequence I found on a help board), it will now make the tone, but maintains the white screen. I am slowly accepting that I am an idiot and the computer is probably a loss. Multiple internet searches have suggested it is either the logic board or the hard drive (at the very least). Any ideas?
My dad is a computer programmer, but does not use macs. He looked at it and just shook his head. I am very non-computer savvy (I know how to turn it on). He did say if it is the logic board I should be able to retrieve all of my (non backed up) files on the hard drive. He said he really doesn't think that it is the hard drive.I also am learning that it will probably be cheaper to replace than to repair. However, I am willing to try anything which might help.
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Jan 3, 2011
I just installed a new ADSL modem/WiFi router from my ISP and now the Mini I have connected to the ADSL modem via ethernet cable has no Airport signal. With the previous ADSL modem/WiFi router I had to use internet sharing over airport from the Mini in order to get WiFi on my other computers. The old modem had WiFi, but I could only get one computer to connect to it, for all the other computers I just used internet sharing. The new modem/WiFi router will let all my computers onto the network, which is great.
My problem is that I use Mobile Air Mouse to use my iPhone as a mouse for the Mini. Since the modem/router upgrade I can't do that.
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May 22, 2012
why i have to unplug the power cable from the back of my imac after every power failure at my home to get the imac to boot up. I've tried resetting the surge protecter and unplugging there. However, the only option is to unplug the cord from the back of the monitor/imac before it will boot up.Â
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.4)
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Jun 15, 2012
Just got my new Macbook Pro Retina. Migrated my applications and data from my Macbook Air. Everything worked great. Apple Update advised that new updates were available. I accepted and ran the updates. Now it gets a kernal panic at boot. Can boot into Safe Mode however. I used Command R to reinstall OSX but that did not correct my problem. Same kernal panic persists.
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Dec 2, 2008
I just recently started to experience some very unusual behavior on an older PowerBook G4, and I was wondering if anyone has experienced this before, as I can't seem to find any documented info on this.Basically, out of the blue, the user began to experience issues waking from sleep, while using the laptop closed with external monitor, USB keyboard and mouse. Although a powercord was always connected, the machine seemed to be powering off.For a while, hitting the power button would boot things up again, properly, but not anymore. I have since disconnected all peripherials. Now, when pressing the power button, the machine will beep 3 times and then repeat itself every so often. The sleep led will blink three times, go solid, then repeat. Sometime the harddrive tries to spin, sometimetimes not
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Jun 21, 2010
I know this is a fairly common subject matter but I have tried just about everything suggested but with no success. detailed below are my findings, I was wondering if anyone better qualified than me could suggest a diagnosis?
What does it do?
I hear the fans and hard drive and see the white/grey boot screen with the apple logo and spinning cog. The cog will spin for anything from 5 - 30 seconds before freezing. Some disk activity will continue for a short time afterwards before everything grinds to a halt?
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Sep 3, 2008
I have a 1T lacie "big disk" that makes a loud whirring noise, then a clack, over and over again. It never gets itself mounted. I am thinking about pulling the disks and plugging them into a another machine, or disk enclosure. Is there any point to trying this or is the fact that I have 4 250G disks tied together to show up as a single 1T drive preclude any heroics?
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Mar 8, 2012
In both Snow Leopard and Lion, I am experiencing start-up disk failures that cannot be repaired by disk utility. Does anyone know what can cause this?
Info:
MacBook-iPhone, iOS 4
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Apr 24, 2012
I take a chainsaw to my Mid 2009 Mac Book Pro.It had been pretty faultless until recently when it started being slow to boot and generally just hanging for a short periods, and then carrying on as normal.Then I had major errors on the 500gb hard disk, which prevented the machine from booting. Using disk utilty, I decided that I needed to wipe and start again. Fortunately much of the data was backed up. I re-installed and all was well for a short while. However, about 3 weeks later I had the same issue, and so I decided to replace the hard disk, even though it did not seem to have any errors or SMART warnings.I put in a new 750Gb disk, and all was well for a few months. Last week I was working abroad in Norway. I rebooted into boot camp to run some software and then back again into OSX and then disaster struck again. (Strangely my boot camp partition has had no issues at all on either hard disk). I couldn't boot into OSX and the emergency recovery (I'm on Lion) came up. Disk Utilitiy told me that the it couldn;t repair the drive.
Now after two hard drives I am a little stuck. The incovenince is massive as I am a working all over the place and rely on the my normally trusty MBP. I am almost ready to replace the MBP, but in truth I can't really afford to do so (in these economic times).Can anyone point me as to why this may be happening. I am hoping it may be bad Ram (easier to replace than a board), but can anyone point as to how to diagnose it. The apple hardware test program I remember for the pre-OSX days doesn;t seem to available now.
Info:
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.3)
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Apr 10, 2012
My iMac does not start up as usual. I now get a ' start up disk is full. You need to make space available on your start up disk by deleting files' message. Â I am able to key my log on password however I just get the purple galaxy screen with no desktop.Â
If I try to use the keyboard I get a tone when pressing the keys. Â
Has worked perfectly well up until I got this dusk full message. Â
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Nov 26, 2009
I tried to install snow leopard on my 3 mos. old macbook pro and received a failure message with the invalid node structure, rebuilding catalog B-tree message.
Not sure what to do, I tried booting up from the leopard install disk and it took about 15 minutes to boot up and everything is wonky, doesn't work right.
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Nov 7, 2006
when my PowerBook (15", bought new in Aug 2004) wakes from sleep, the harddrive makes a dreaded tapping/clicking sound. It's very prominent and is not your standard HDD "chatter."Often, Finder will hang and I'm forced to power-cycle the machine. Most of the time, it boots without incident.Lately, however, there have been incidents. Tonight, when I got home, it froze. I tried to power-cycle it, but got nothing. I plugged it in.
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Jan 28, 2008
I have a 12" Powerbook G4 running 10.3.9 Panther. I am having problem booting my computer from a Firewire HD. I have done a search in the forum but cannot get a definite and/or successul solution. Forum moderators and my respected macrumor fellows, please feel free to direct me to a specific link if you find the questions redundant.Recently, I have had the HD making terrible noise and several days ago, the computer cannot boot at all. When I pushed the power button, the screen shows a folder in the middle with a Mac face and switches to a question mark back and forth. However, it just gets stuck at that stage. I suspected that I have a HD problem and wanted to boot from my clone Firewire HD. Unfortunately, the computer will not boot with Firewire HD either.
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Jul 6, 2009
when power pressed to boot, it will go into boot, but then the screen starts flickering from dim to bright a clicking sound is heard, the power cord on the side changes from dark to light amber. the screen then goes to black. some times am able to get to log in then it just goes black.- More information- my harddrive had been making erratic noises for about... 3-4 months. some loud clicking... in thinking that the hd failed i bought a 160gb WD Scoirpio blue IDE drive... These problems still persist. even when i option to start up with my external drive, which i have mirrored my hard drive. it will boot up for the external then this clicking noise as noted above.
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Mar 10, 2012
I have recently installed new RAM and an SSD in my late 2009 MacBook Pro, running OS X 10.6.8, and it now frequently hangs when I try to start it up. Here are details:Â
In recent weeks I noticed signs that seemed to point to a failing hard drive. I took the machine to a Genius Bar. The genius tried Disk Utility and a quick diagnostic and could not reproduce an error, but he noted many, many I/O errors recorded in a log file. Â
He said I probably had a failing disk, but it might be a cable issue. He gave me two options: leave the machine with Apple overnight to run diagnostics and perhaps repair if the problem was confirmed, or just take a chance and replace the drive myself, for less money and less downtime. Â
I went to a local computer store, and the salesman there noted that I was using relatively little disk space. He suggested that I swap my failing 160 G disk for a smaller, 120G solid-state drive, which happened to be on sale. I agreed and also bought some new RAM. Â
I installed the drive and RAM, partitioned the disk (with HFS journaling), and restored my files with Time Machine. For that day and the next, everything worked perfectly. Â
The second day after the installation, the system hung while starting up. The Apple logo appeared, the gray spinner appeared, and it just spun. I tried resetting PRAM. I tried safe restart. I started up from the install disk and ran Disk Utility: no problems found. I repaired permissions. I took out the new RAM and put back the old. In some cases after trying these steps, the system booted fine — once. In others, it would not boot the first time, but would boot on the second or third attempt. I reinstalled OS X and updated software. The problem persisted. I installed some freeware to enable trimming the new disk. No better. Â
I have booted many times in verbose mode. During the unsuccessful boots, there is usually a message "Bug: launchctl.c: 3557 (23930):6 ioctl(S6, SIO CAIFADOR_IN6, &ifra6) ! = -1". The next line is the command "fsck_hfs", and the machine hangs. Eventually it sometimes spits out "launchctl: please convert the following to launchd: /etc/mach_init.d/dashboardadvisory.plist". If I let it go for a long time, I sometimes come back to find a long string of I/O error messages, to the effect that media was expect to be there but wasn’t. I think every time I have gotten the launchctl message, it has booted successfully on the next try. Â
During the successful boots in verbose mode, everything happens so quickly that it is hard to say what is going on, but I don’t think it is running fsck_hfs. If it boots successfully and I give it a heavy I/O task, like doing a virus scan, everything works fine. If I run Disk Utility off the installation disk, it says the disk appears to be OK. Â
I started the machine in single user mode and ran fsck manually. It gave me reports similar to running Disk Utility, and told me the disk appeared to be OK. It then gave me the prompt for a new command. I typed "exit". It responded "logout". And hung.Â
One last thing: I just tried a couple of times to restart with the Apple Hardware test. Despite holding down the D key, the test failed to load, and after a long pause, the machine attempted a normal start-up. Â
Info:
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
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Jul 6, 2009
I have a 1 TB LaCie Big Disk Extreme 2 that is actually made up of 2 500GB drives. It failed on me. I have most of it backed up but there are a few things I would like to recover. I tested another power cord and it didn't work. So I talked to a few people and they said that if I bought a new seagate controller board that matches my 500GB drives identically I would be able to get the data off one drive at a time. There is some good and some bad. When I tested the new controller board on each drive (one at a time only because I only have one new controller board) they both started up normally! Success I thought.. but no.. Both Leopard and XP said "drive needs to be formatted" or "initialized".
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Sep 3, 2014
I just used Disk Utility to make a backup of a MBA (65GB) onto a 500GB external drive (Restore from internal HDD to external HDD). I then reformatted the internal hard disk and proceeded to restore my backup (external HDD to internal HDD). I soon received an error message stating "Restore Failure - not enough space". I guess that means Disk Utility backups are a one-way operation, since you can't restore from a larger drive to a smaller one? Is there something I am overlooking? I ended up using Carbon Copy Cloner to do the job, but I'm wondering how (if?) restoring from a larger backup drive is possible using Disk Utility?
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