Wont boot since upgrade

Since upgrading to El Cap my '10 Macbook doesn't want to boot. Gets stuck at grey Apple screen, start of progress bar.
What I've done:
Boot into recovery and run Disk Util repair.... says disk is fine.
Run Onyx, the new one. Did the works.
Checked Startup Disk. Set for my boot drive.
Tried booting with Option key, selected boot disk.

I'm thinking it's new drive time but Disk Util says it's fine, even Smart status.
So, make a trip to OWC? Any other ideas? (kinda thinking SSD, wouldn't that be nice)

Yeah, it does sound like the drive may have decided to go south. SSD's from OWC are reasonably priced, may be time to go for it.

cradom said:

Any other ideas?

Click to expand...

Have you tried reinstalling the OS from the Recovery Partition? If this is successful (and stable)…maybe the drive is ok. Then you could try the El Capitan upgrade again.

If the reinstall fails…maybe the drive is bad.

- Nick

How is it you were able to run the latest OnyX without the drive in question booting up?

It'll boot if you try enough times. Just ordered a 240 gig SSD from OWC. Fresh new install of El Cap when it comes.
We'll see after that.
Also, tried Disk Warrior on it. Couldn't rebuild because it was on the boot drive but checked the drive. Said OK (but I think it just checked the Smart status. Too **** fast for anything else).

Craig somewhere you should have DW on a CD. Personally always found the CD too slow and boot my backup SD external drive and run it from there. Ahh the joy of not using TM.

SSD arrived about 5:00p Installed Yosemite. Realized what I did, erased and am installing El Cap (getting old is a b**ch).
11 minutes remaining at 6:37. We'll see how it goes.

Wrong again!!!!! Getting old is great. Not getting the chance to get old is the b**ch!

Went to bed while it was copying from the backup. Woke up this morning to "Sign in with your Apple ID".
Still need to set things up properly. Seems to be working OK.


Edit: Ok, got to work and it wont boot again........
Took a couple tries for it to boot. I don't know what's wrong with it.
When I get home it gets wiped and Yosemite put back on.
I don't have this problem with the iMac.

I "might" have found a solution, on Apple Discussions.
Boot to recovery, open Terminal and type:
touch /Volumes/harddrivename/System/Library/Extensions
Quit Terminal, quit installer, select "Select Startup Disk".
Select your startup drive. Go get coffee, it takes a while.
Select Restart.
Started right up. Will see if it continues to boot properly. One can hope.

This has something to do with the Extensions cache not updating properly when installing El Cap.
The touch command changes the dates and forces the OS to update the cache.

Then again, this could all be a load of BS and it just happened to boot this time. Time will tell.

Oh ye of little faith!


Sent from my iPhone using Mac Forums

Oh me of little patience. I've been having this problem for a week and a half.