During upgrade to snow leopard stuck on apple logo
Alec Jacobson
March 15, 2011
Yesterday I finally got around to updating the OS on my macbook pro from Leopard (mac os x 10.5) to Snow Leopard (mac os x 10.6). I had debated waiting until Lion (10.7), set to appear this summer, but while I would probably want to wait until it had stabilized in the fall and applications were already turning their backs on Leopard I decided to just give in early.
I bought the Snow Leopard DVD, inserted it, pushed start and let it go. For about 30 mins it had a standard dialog box and progress bar, reporting that it was busy unpacking and installing. Then it rebooted itself at hung on the apple logo start up screen for 3 hours.
I read a few other reports of this online and it seemed a lot of people had given up sooner than 3 hours and had lots of problems, so I let it go. The computer started getting warm after a few hours: the DVD drive seemed to be busy the entire time. Finally I gave up and held the power button to force a shutdown. When I restarted it never even got to the apple logo, just a grey screen.
At this point I really gave up. Being in New York, where there is a 24 hour apple store it's easy to give up. I held the power button down to force another shutdown and biked my laptop to the Genius Bar.
There the clerk told me that the installation had paused for whatever reason only partly done. He force ejected the DVD then plugged in a Firewire drive and finished the installation booting from the Firewire device.
After 45 mins everything was installed and so far everything has been working fine.