No longer able to boot (gray bar)

[Hepatitan]

For some reason I cannot get my MacOS partition to boot now. It's running Lion 10.7.1, and it had been running like a champ since being installed last week. But today after restarting I can no longer boot up.

 

Problem: When I choose the Mac partition I get a gray bar about 50px by 500px near the top-left of my screen, and it appears to freeze up.

 

Solution Attempts: I've tried booting with Andy's Boot (which is what I used to install and setup the system), and instead of the gray bar I get a flicker of the apple boot screen followed by an immediate restart. Booting into safe mode is exactly the same. Booting with single user does not get me to a prompt, but either shows the gray bar after all the verbose messages, or reboots (depending on whether I'm using the boot disc or not).

The last things I changed before this happened were:

- I was having an issue with the CMOS being reset, and I read something about it potentially happening after coming out of sleep mode. So I went to my Energy settings and disabled the automatic sleep. I also disabled powering down the hard drives, and disabled the power button from turning on sleep.

- I modified my com.apple.Boot.plist file to try and hide one of my non-bootable drives that for some reason was continuing to show up. I also removed the Timeout flag which wasn't necessary since I'm using Instant Menu.

 

The system was running great before. All my hardware was recognized (audio, video, dual monitors, printer, keyboard, mouse, other drives), I've had zero kernel panics, and no prior boot issues. I would greatly appreciate any help I can get on this. I'd really love to avoid reinstalling again.

 

Hardware specs:

- Intel Core i7-2600K Sandy Bridge

- 8GB memory

- ASUS P8P67-M Pro

- EVGA GTX 580

 

Current com.apple.Boot.plist file (I realize that the hidden partition is done wrong, I was experimenting):

 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">

<plist version="1.0">

<dict>

<key>Instant Menu</key>

<string>Yes</string>

<key>Hide Partition</key>

<string>hd(0,5);"Windows"</string>

<key>Rename Partition</key>

<string>"System Reserved" "Windows 7";"Mac" "Mac OS X";hd(0,3) "Ubuntu 11"</string>

<key>Kernel</key>

<string>mach_kernel</string>

<key>Kernel Flags</key>

<string></string>

<key>GraphicsEnabler</key>

<string>Yes</string>

<key>Graphics Mode</key>

<string></string>

<key>EthernetBuiltIn</key>

<string>Yes</string>

</dict>

</plist>

[Hepatitan]

Resolved!

 

I was unable to edit the com.apple.Boot.plist file in Linux, but using MacDrive I was able to in Windows. As it turns out the boot file was indeed the culprit.

 

Specifically this line:

<key>Hide Partition</key>

<string>hd(0,5);"Windows"</string>

 

Turns out I should have used a space instead of semi-colon. Amazing that this little issue could cause the OS not to boot (especially since hd(0,2) is the Mac partition, not hd(0,5)... but whatever). Clearly the Boot file couldn't be interpreted correctly.

 

Happy to be back on!