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Hard Drive swap has altered bootup!!

D

detritustroll

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 25, 2007
13
0
Ok, so i know my thread line sounds like a "duh...Of course" quote.

But this is the story.

I've just bought a nice new macbook (white, intel 2ghz with 4gb ram), i only opted to have the 120gb hard-drive as i had a very nice new 320gb sata drive sat on my desk. I installed the new drive, and installed Leopard. However, whenever i boot up instead of getting the nice apple logo on a white background i get what looks like a load of shell scripts (or terminal) running the bootup processes. It then loads into leopard fine, but looks a bit odd.

Any suggestions??
 
Hmm...you're sure you reinstalled OS X on that 320 drive while it was inside the MacBook?

The reason I ask is because when I moved from a MacBook Pro to a MacBook, and took the drive from the MBP and threw it in the MB, I got the behavior you described. It boots up in verbose mode as a sign that you've got incorrect drivers installed for that hardware (ie, my MBP-specific Leopard installation didn't like being inside a MacBook).
 
Turn the computer off. Hold the Option key. Turn the computer on. Then select the OS X partition, which may or may not be the only one and see if it continues.

EDIT: Sorry, double post.
 
MBHockey said:
Hmm...you're sure you reinstalled OS X on that 320 drive while it was inside the MacBook?

The reason I ask is because when I moved from a MacBook Pro to a MacBook, and took the drive from the MBP and threw it in the MB, I got the behavior you described. It boots up in verbose mode as a sign that you've got incorrect drivers installed for that hardware (ie, my MBP-specific Leopard installation didn't like being inside a MacBook).
Click to expand...

Yep the drive was formatted and installed using this Macbook.

When i hold down the option key i get a boot menu (macbook drive only shown as i dont have a windows partition). If i select that drive to boot from i get the shell style startup still.
 
If everything works just open Terminal and type "sudo nvram boot-args=" without the quotes of course.
 
There is no problem

What you are describing is verbose booting. It is a bootup option used in troubleshooting. Essentially it is showing everything that happens behind the grey apple screen on a normal bootup.

The above poster has the correct instructions for disabling it.
 
I had something similar so I had to erase the partition, then re partition it using the GUID, then erased the HDD again, and everything was perfect after my fresh install, this also happened to me on another notebook when I was trying to utilize boot camp, I could not setup a boot camp partition until I did what I said in the beginning of this message.


Good Luck :D
 
Wicked1 said:
I had something similar so I had to erase the partition, then re partition it using the GUID, then erased the HDD again, and everything was perfect after my fresh install, this also happened to me on another notebook when I was trying to utilize boot camp, I could not setup a boot camp partition until I did what I said in the beginning of this message.


Good Luck :D
Click to expand...

Or reset the P-RAM... I was pretty used to watching the Darwin scripts on the Mac Mini and then one day I happened to need to do a P-RAM reset, and suddenly ping, back to Apple and Spinning Gear during startup.

It's nothing harmful it is literally the Apple equivalent of all the white-on-black jargon that Windows users see on startup. You certainly should not have to reformat anything at all.
 
Zal91 said:
If everything works just open Terminal and type "sudo nvram boot-args=" without the quotes of course.
Click to expand...

yippy said:
What you are describing is verbose booting. It is a bootup option used in troubleshooting. Essentially it is showing everything that happens behind the grey apple screen on a normal bootup.

The above poster has the correct instructions for disabling it.
Click to expand...

Yes, this is what the Mac is doing. But the question is why?

It doesn't sound like the OP is familiar enough with his Mac to have accidentally turned on verbose mode for booting, but a Mac will start up in verbose mode if it senses driver differences between the system it is expecting to boot and the system it is actually booting. There may be other reasons for a Mac to all of a sudden use verbose mode on its own; i'm not sure.

But either way, if the OP didn't accidentally turn on verbose mode (either in a tweaking app like Cocktail or Onyx or by typing it in Terminal -- which he would probably remember) then simply clearing the flag from the nvram isn't going to fix the root problem.
 
MBHockey said:
... but a Mac will start up in verbose mode if it senses driver differences between the system it is expecting to boot and the system it is actually booting. ...
Click to expand...

Mine was triggered right from the word go because of a logic board RAM problem; the system knew it had 1GB RAM but couldn't figure out why there was only one 512MB chip. I'm not entirely sure why I stopped seeing the scripts following the P-RAM reset, because the problem was there until the whole machine died (issue unrelated). If the machine is simply sensing its on a new hard drive, I see no harm in zapping it back into Apple Gear mode.

Though I could be wrong.
 
Have held down Option, Cmd, P R and let it chime twice, but still to no avail!!

Oh well, i'll live with it!
 
Download Onyx or Cocktail, and use it to disable verbose mode. However, I would run an apple diagnostic from your leopard disc first. Good luck.
 
Any idea?

fpar said:
Download Onyx or Cocktail, and use it to disable verbose mode.
Click to expand...
I did this:

  • PRAM-Zapping (5x sound)
  • Applejack (cleaning everything)
  • Cocktail (cleaning everything)
  • Terminal (sudo nvram boot-args=)
  • Terminal (sudo nvram boot-args="")
But the iMac is still booting in verbose mode. It's a new machine, with has been offline-cloned with Disk Utility.app.

I really don't want to reinstall the complete machine due to it's a lot (to much) work.

Any idea?
 
detritustroll said:
However, whenever i boot up instead of getting the nice apple logo on a white background i get what looks like a load of shell scripts (or terminal) running the bootup processes. It then loads into leopard fine, but looks a bit odd.

Any suggestions??
Click to expand...
I've had this problem before while using Carbon Copy Cloner and swapping hard drives. I was able to solve this problem by using disk utility and repair permissions by inserting the factory disks.
 
Open this file;

/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist

and check if there is something between the two string tags. Should look like this:


Code: 
<key>Kernel Flags</key>
<string></string>

If there is a "-v" between them you will have to remove them ( you will need to use sudo to make the changes to the file, like copying it to the desktop, modifying it with textedit and then using sudo to move it back.
 
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