Mac freezes 'loading drivers'

[Remzo]

Hi mac experts, merry x mas from a rainy Holland,

My mac mini mid 2011 was getting a bit slow. One of the tips was to perform a SafeBoot so it would repair itself a bit. That sounded quiet safe, but ... It got stuck. Eventually i reinstalled Lion via the recovery mode. It is still stuck. When i look in Verbose Mode it shows:



Efiboot loaded from device: Acpi (PNP0A3 etc. ... )
Boot file path : system \ librairy \coreservices\boot.efi
Loading kernel cache file : \system\librairy\caches\com.apple.kext.caches\startup\kernelcache
Loading mach kernel
Root device uuid is 'a8f etc
Loading drivers...
...................................
...................................
...........


And thats it. It stops.

What to do....?

 

[honestone]

Seems like you got a bad file there (or files). What you will need to do is to have your Mac Mini in "Target Disk Mode", and from the attached, good machine, launch Disk Utility from there and completely wipe the hard drive clean (use the "most passes", longest way when doing that), and then re-install Lion.

 

[Remzo]

I didn't have another machine, but i found out that the StartUp Manager was still working. (You can access this by holding down the option key when booting.) I could wipe my hard drive clean from there. I reinstalled mountain lion and now everything is working fine. My mac mini is much faster now

Thank you for your advice, honstone!

 

[honestone]

Glad you got things working again, Remzo. Never knew that one could do all that disk maintenance/repairs, etc. via the StartUp Manager. As the old saying goes, "Learn something new everyday".