When you upgrade your installation of OS X, the OS X installer will attempt to detect and remove any incompatible software that may destabilize your system. However, there are times when such software may slip past Apple’s detection routines and affect your system. While often you can use troubleshooting routines after installation to manage such problems, on rare occasion these issues may prevent your Mac from booting altogether, leaving you with no ability to use your machine. Continue reading
Tag Archives: bootup
Fix OS X hanging at bootup after installing 10.10.3
After installing OS X 10.10.3, you will find your Mac undergo the standard restart that is part of the update process, but then see it hang up as OS X loads, leaving you with a gray screen. This is likely happening because because of some changes made to Apple’s FileVault full disk encryption routine.
Along with the 10.10.3 update, Apple issued an update for the OS X Recovery system in Yosemite, which will adjust some of the contents of the hidden recovery partition. This partition is used for unlocking your boot drive at startup, and it appears a problem with the update for some people has caused the drive to improperly unlock the drive. Continue reading
Tackle your Mac booting to a gray screen
Given the efficiency and convenience of sleep mode on Mac systems, it is often a rarity that we end up restarting our Macs. When we do, we expect it to boot to normal operation; however, sometimes a snafu may result in your Mac booting to a gray screen, and no further. Often such behavior happens because of a specific problem, such as a power outage, or the installation of a new software package, but regardless, if it happens there are essentially only a few things that you can do. Continue reading
How to silence your Mac’s startup sound
When you press the power button to start up your Mac, you will be met with a boot chime that lets you know your system is healthy and ready to load OS X. However, this sound can be a bit intrusive, and there may be times when you would prefer to not have it play. Since sleep mode will not make such sounds when waking, you can always use it instead of shutting down your Mac; however, if you need to cold-boot your Mac, then you have a couple of approaches for muting that boot chime. Continue reading
Spice up OS X’s loading with Verbose mode
When starting up an old Mac running the Classic Mac OS, you would see a number of installed system extensions loading along the bottom of the screen, but when you start up OS X, you are shown a fairly bland image of a gray background with an Apple symbol that appears. During this time, a number of background processes are starting up to allow you to use your system; however, you are not shown these and instead are shown either a progress bar or spinning wheel of sorts that simply indicates to you that something is happening, but does not say what. Continue reading
Tackle OS X only booting in Safe Mode
Safe Mode in OS X is a limited boot environment where only essential system services are active. It is a great option to have when troubleshooting software problems on your system, and when you invoke it by holding the Shift key at startup, your Mac should show a gray progress bar and then an indication in the menu bar that you are in Safe mode. This mode should only be active when you specify it by holding the Shift key at bootup; however, Continue reading