Boot Problems, pulling FW/USB drives fixes...

[illegallydead]

I am having problems after upgrading my '07 Macbook (replaced HDD with a bigger, faster one, and upgraded RAM from 2GB to 4GB). I am running Leopard, BTW.

When I restart my laptop, and have either USB or FW drives plugged in, the laptop will not boot into OSX. I will get the startup bong, then one of two things will happen: either the computer will hang on the white screen, or it will start to actually boot up, but will hang up after getting the primary device uid, meaning it is not actually loading any of OSX itself (I have verbose bootup activated)

If I unplug the devices before I restart, then I have no problems, it boots up (and super freaking quickly after the upgrade woohoo!)

Has anyone else had this problem, and is there a quick fix for it? Thanks for the help!

 

[spinnerlys]

You could try an SMC reset, as it fixes a lot of issues with external drives sometimes.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1411

 

[illegallydead]

I more or less did that multiple times. Not sure if I held it down for the full 5 seconds, but after working on my old XP box, a hard power cycling like that is kind of my go-to way to fix problems, lol.

Would repairing permissions on any or all disks maybe work? Not sure what effect a permissions repair actually has, let alone on booting...

 

[spinnerlys]

What about System Preferences > Startup Disk > Choosing your Mac OS Disk?

Not the circled one, of course.

 

[illegallydead]

What about System Preferences > Startup Disk > Choosing your Mac OS Disk?

<snip>

Not the circled one, of course.

It's a problem beyond that from what I can tell. The few times it hung on the white screen it wouldn't even allow me to select the startup disk (by holding the option key). When it does get into the verbose startup sequence, it has obviously selected a startup disk, but something is keeping it from reading OSX beyond that initial disk read sequence.

I re-selected Macintosh HD as the startup disk to be safe, and will try to see if that solves anything when I get home where I can recreate the sequence I described. Thanks for the suggestion.