Can't Safe Boot?

[MysteryGuest]

Trying to safe boot to troubleshoot a problem, but holding down the shift key hangs me at the Apple screen. I can restart normally. Is there something I'm not getting here?

[Fred_Also]

Macfixit had something on this the other day but when I search it, it has cycled to their member only site. (I'm not a paid member)

Safe boot doesn't work -- check default boot partition (was headline)

Fred Also

[JJ]

Boot from OS X DVD. Run Disk Utility. Retry safe boot. I am guessing here.

[m.paris]

As I recall, the MacFixIt article mentioned inordinately long boot times when using safe boot on some systems. They even suggested holding down the shift key with some object until it started up. Several minutes or more could be required. That may be the problem or it may be a problem with the most recent update in that some people were unable to do a safe boot at all. Unfortunately, I don't remember the solution to that. It may have required firewire target mode or booting from another drive (or DVD) to use the Disk Utility to do a disk repair or booting into single user mode and running fsck or deleting the plist files for loginwindow.

[MysteryGuest]

The MacFixIt articles comments, accessible through Google, contained the following useful comments:

"In some instances, safe booting can take an extraordinarily long time. You may even need to use an object to depress the Shift key while you are starting up then leave the system in order to invoke safe boot."

and

"You only have to hold the shift key down until you see the spinning gear on the grey screen which should only take a minute or two. You can then let go of the shift key."

So I've been able to complete a safe boot, which should help to resolve the problem this weekend. Thanks, all! I'm still on Tiger, so the 10.5x problems are not the issue.

I used to use MacFixIt quite a bit until they went to a paid mode. I'm much too cheap to pay them for user-supplied content.