SERIOUS problem with lion -- can't restart!

[eroxx]

I am attaching the screen image. Bizarrely, every OTHER time I turn the computer on, it seems to work ... ?

 

[Macshroomer]

Be really careful with this, I had a hard freeze, finder lockup in deleting 1,800 photos out of a folder on one my drives on my brand new Mac Pro and it toasted the drive.
I went back to OSX 10.6.8 permanently as this is by far the nastiest OS version on launch I have seen in over 20 years...

I am skipping this OS entirely, will probably go for 10.8 when upgrading hardware in 3-5 years, this one is total BS for pro use....

 

[Taz Mangus]

Be really careful with this, I had a hard freeze, finder lockup in deleting 1,800 photos out of a folder on one my drives on my brand new Mac Pro and it toasted the drive.
I went back to OSX 10.6.8 permanently as this is by far the nastiest OS version on launch I have seen in over 20 years...

I am skipping this OS entirely, will probably go for 10.8 when upgrading hardware in 3-5 years, this one is total BS for pro use....

I highly doubt that Lion caused the failure of your hard drive. More likely the hard drive was fauty. I have now installed Lion on two Mac computers, a 2011 27" iMac and 2009 17" MacBook Pro and in both cases Lion as been very solid for a .0 release.

 

[Quad5Ny]

That's a Kernel Panic. Apparently your either missing a certain kext (or your on a hackintosh?).

Try this:

1. Power Down
2. Reset the SMC & Then NVRAM (http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3964, http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1379)
3. Open Disk Utility and Verify the Hard drive and all the partitions
4. Power Down
5. Power on and as soon as you hear the startup tone hold down the left Shift key
6. Once you see a progress bar pop up let go of the shift key
7. Booting will take a long time, just let it finish
8. Now open Terminal and type "sudo touch /System/Library/Extensions"
9. Quit Terminal
10. Restart
11. Open Disk Utility & Repair Disk Permissions
12. Open Terminal and type "sudo update_dyld_shared_cache -force" & wait for it to finish (do not do anything while it's working)
13. Restart
14. Open Terminal
15. Type "sudo periodic daily weekly monthly"
16. Finally type "newsyslog -F"
17. Power down (your done)

This will rebuild the kext cache, dyld cache and preform a few different maintenance tasks.


If this does not work, your going to have to open up Console and provide us with better error messages or start in Verbose mode (hold Command-V before Apple logo) and take a picture of the screen. But IMO it would just be easier to backup and do a clean install.