Grey Progress Bar Of Doom?

[pjskeleton]

Hey there! Ok, so today I just upgraded my stock Macbook hard drive to a Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid 500GB 7200 RPM drive, and I upgraded the stock RAM to 8GB of DDR3 1333. After the upgrade, everything worked smoothly. And freaking screamed out frames on Wolfenstein and Devil May Cry 4 in Boot Camp! Barely dropped under 50 FPS on high settings. It was a beautiful thing 😀 When I quit Wolfenstein, and rebooted using the Windows menu, OSX was starting up normally. Then a grey progress bar loaded up and took about five minutes to fill. I should also mention that the Wolenstein disc was still in the drive when this happened, in case that's in any way relevant. I wondered what was wrong, so I restarted from the Apple Menu and got it again. And then a third time. So now I'm making a full backup onto my external drive. In case it's a failing hard drive like most of the stuff I found from googling and searching on here said it was, if the progress bar showed up numerous times. And I'm writing this question in the hope that someone highly competent answers. I really know my hardware stuff, I have my A+ certification for my job and a computer science and engineering degree from CMU i honestly barely use, this is just a problem I haven't ever encountered before. Could anyone shed some light on exactly why the bar is showing up for me, and how I can fix it?

 

[iThinkergoiMac]

What happens after the progress bar fills? Does it just hang there? Am I correct in assuming this is the one that shows up under the Apple symbol?

 

[pjskeleton]

What happens after the progress bar fills? Does it just hang there? Am I correct in assuming this is the one that shows up under the Apple symbol?

After the progress bar fills, the system works normally, however once shutdown/rebooted the progress bar re-appears. And yes you are correct, it's the progress bar under the spinning...well...for lack of a better descriptor, startup spinner thing, under the Apple logo, on a light grey screen. Since I posted I did a few different thing. First I tried to do a full Time Machine backup but it kept only going at kilobytes at a time so instead I compared my last backup to the current state of things on the disk, copied everything new onto the external, and restored from the old backup and replaced the new things onto the hard drive. All i'm missing is probably some e-mails, however those will still be on server so they'll download directly. I have yet to reboot, I'll do so immediately to see if it's all solved.

EDIT: I just rebooted and walah! All good, and blazing fast again. Ran a stability check using drive genius and it passed with flying colors. It turns out, it was just a formatting issue. I had cloned the Macintosh HD partition by accident instead of the entire disk, meaning that a lot of the small but fundamental system partitions weren't put onto the new hard disk. I just used Disk Utility on the OSX Install disc to format the drive, then restored from the old Time machine backup, copied over all the new files, and I'm good to go! Let that be a lesson to all upgraders, either clone the ENTIRE hard disk or use the Restore disc to format everything right. Oops. What a rookie mistake. Shame upon myself....shame...shame...shame...shame...shame...

 

[iThinkergoiMac]

Glad you got it figured out!