OK, so this has happened to me about a dozen times over the last few years on a variety of Macs, and I just diagnosed it on someone else's Mac.
What happens is that somehow the Mac gets the idea that it is set to boot from the network. On the next reboot, it just hangs - because there's no netboot volume on the network.
Fixing is easy, boot with the Option key or some other modifier and it will then come up fine and then access the preferences and set the boot target to the local disk. What's puzzling is that generally the preferences pane is already correctly set. Only rarely have I seen "boot from network" selected in that pane, usually nothing is set at all.
Usually a few months later this issue will crop up again - so the fix isn't totally permanent. I've tried locking down that preference setting to no avail.
Any ideas on what's going on here?
What happens is that somehow the Mac gets the idea that it is set to boot from the network. On the next reboot, it just hangs - because there's no netboot volume on the network.
Fixing is easy, boot with the Option key or some other modifier and it will then come up fine and then access the preferences and set the boot target to the local disk. What's puzzling is that generally the preferences pane is already correctly set. Only rarely have I seen "boot from network" selected in that pane, usually nothing is set at all.
Usually a few months later this issue will crop up again - so the fix isn't totally permanent. I've tried locking down that preference setting to no avail.
Any ideas on what's going on here?