First boot MBP 15 SR 2.4GHz

[cookieme]

Hi

I just purchased a new MacBook Pro 15" Santa Rosa 2.4GHz. I have been a mac user for 8 years and never had the problem I experienced with this laptop. After I plugged in the power supply, I pressed the power button and I heard the startup chime. It then proceeded to the grey background with the apple logo and the circular loading icon. It was loading for a long time. Eventually the blue screen appeared and here too, it took a long time before the setup dialogue appeared asking me to choose a setup language. I have not been able to click the arrow to continue with my chosen language. The beachball has been spinning for at least 1 hour. Is this normal? Should I be worried there might be a hardware problem? I have searched apple's forums and here for an answer, but haven't found anything.

As a side note, when my father purchased the laptop (I wasn't present at the Apple Reseller), the salesman booted up the computer to make sure it was working and then apparently shut it down. Could this have caused the problem I am having? I think this was very stupid of him. Ok, he could have started it in single user mode and just typed "top" to check that it was working, but to start up and then shut down when the first boot is an initial configuration was not smart.

Please advise me on what to do now? Should I force shutdown by holding the power button and then boot up again with the Apple Hardware Test or just try and run the setup again?

Finally, should I return it and get a new one?

Thanks

 

[eenu]

Hi

I just purchased a new MacBook Pro 15" Santa Rosa 2.4GHz. I have been a mac user for 8 years and never had the problem I experienced with this laptop. After I plugged in the power supply, I pressed the power button and I heard the startup chime. It then proceeded to the grey background with the apple logo and the circular loading icon. It was loading for a long time. Eventually the blue screen appeared and here too, it took a long time before the setup dialogue appeared asking me to choose a setup language. I have not been able to click the arrow to continue with my chosen language. The beachball has been spinning for at least 1 hour. Is this normal? Should I be worried there might be a hardware problem? I have searched apple's forums and here for an answer, but haven't found anything.

As a side note, when my father purchased the laptop (I wasn't present at the Apple Reseller), the salesman booted up the computer to make sure it was working and then apparently shut it down. Could this have caused the problem I am having? I think this was very stupid of him. Ok, he could have started it in single user mode and just typed "top" to check that it was working, but to start up and then shut down when the first boot is an initial configuration was not smart.

Please advise me on what to do now? Should I force shutdown by holding the power button and then boot up again with the Apple Hardware Test or just try and run the setup again?

Finally, should I return it and get a new one?

Thanks

Apple hardware test.... if it passes do a clean install.

 

[cookieme]

Thanks eenu for your quick reply. The setup has now moved on to the next stage"starting mac osx" while I was writing my initial post. Why is it so slow? Should I jsut keep waiting and let it boot up completely with the welcome movie and then setup guide? Do you think this is due to a hardware problem or just the salesman's stupidity?

 

[Atomic-Ed]

Thanks eenu for your quick reply. The setup has now moved on to the next stage"starting mac osx" while I was writing my initial post. Why is it so slow? Should I jsut keep waiting and let it boot up completely with the welcome movie and then setup guide? Do you think this is due to a hardware problem or just the salesman's stupidity?

I am new to macs and osx and do not know the answer to this but why not just let it finish and then afterwards test it by shutting it down and starting it up a few times to see if the slowdowns are there once the install or setup completes. I would also take note to make sure your screen and all other critical areas of the machine are good. If so all the more reason to keep it if it turns out to be just a setup sequence thing from the salesman shutting it off as you mentioned.

 

[cookieme]

I am new to macs and osx and do not know the answer to this but why not just let it finish and then afterwards test it by shutting it down and starting it up a few times to see if the slowdowns are there once the install or setup completes. I would also take note to make sure your screen and all other critical areas of the machine are good. If so all the more reason to keep it if it turns out to be just a setup sequence thing from the salesman shutting it off as you mentioned.

Yeah, Atomic-Ed I spent quite a bit of time inspecting the outside of my laptop before I even plugged it in. Everything is perfect within Apple's manufacturing "standards" and poor quality control. I'll wait and see if it will launch the setup guide and once all that is done and it has booted into osx, I'll restart and run AHT and see what happens.

 

[Atomic-Ed]

Yeah, Atomic-Ed I spent quite a bit of time inspecting the outside of my laptop before I even plugged it in. Everything is perfect within Apple's manufacturing "standards" and poor quality control. I'll wait and see if it will launch the setup guide and once all that is done and it has booted into osx, I'll restart and run AHT and see what happens.

Good luck with it, I am hoping all ends up well for you. Especially since everything else looks good.

 

[cookieme]

Good luck with it, I am hoping all ends up well for you. Especially since everything else looks good.

Thank you Atomic-Ed. I hope you are enjoying being a mac user and I'm sure the more you learn about osx and everything that goes with it, you'll ask yourself why you didn't switch earlier.

Unfortunately, my new laptop is not doing well. It has been "starting mac osx" for about an hour now and although the aqua bar has reached the end nothing is happening at the moment. I'll leave it and see if something will happen, but from owning four macs, this is the first time I have had this type of problem on a brand new machine while booting up.

 

[Atomic-Ed]

Thank you Atomic-Ed. I hope you are enjoying being a mac user and I'm sure the more you learn about osx and everything that goes with it, you'll ask yourself why you didn't switch earlier.

Unfortunately, my new laptop is not doing well. It has been "starting mac osx" for about an hour now and although the aqua bar has reached the end nothing is happening at the moment. I'll leave it and see if something will happen, but from owning four macs, this is the first time I have had this type of problem on a brand new machine while booting up.

Thanks, I am really enjoying it so far. I have been into PCs for over 20+ years and I am a Systems Engineer as well, so you can imagine I have not truly had an opportunity to switchover do to my line of work and the older compatibility concerns of previous gen macs. Now things are different and I have have alot more options. This and the help of Vista with its DRM and AActivation nightmares, finally got me over the edge to buy the Mac. Of course all the cool new tech in the latest MBP didn't hurt either.

Let us know how your machine end sup and I am keeping my fingers crossed for you. It will be great if it gets through it all and then works fine afterwards.

 

[WildPalms]

Thank you Atomic-Ed. I hope you are enjoying being a mac user and I'm sure the more you learn about osx and everything that goes with it, you'll ask yourself why you didn't switch earlier.

Unfortunately, my new laptop is not doing well. It has been "starting mac osx" for about an hour now and although the aqua bar has reached the end nothing is happening at the moment. I'll leave it and see if something will happen, but from owning four macs, this is the first time I have had this type of problem on a brand new machine while booting up.

If you purchase a new MacBook Pro, and it does not perform as it should (i.e. like others in store) as yours is clearly NOT doing, I would suggest you return it for a swap out. If you're notebook is not starting up within 3 minutes or less, it has some serious issues. My MacBook Pro (series 1) boots up from cold in around 1 minute 12 seconds... thats to desktop after all my login items have started up.

Seriously, take your unit back and get it replaced.

 

[DoFoT9]

If you purchase a new MacBook Pro, and it does not perform as it should (i.e. like others in store) as yours is clearly NOT doing, I would suggest you return it for a swap out. If you're notebook is not starting up within 3 minutes or less, it has some serious issues. My MacBook Pro (series 1) boots up from cold in around 1 minute 12 seconds... thats to desktop after all my login items have started up.

Seriously, take your unit back and get it replaced.

haha mines 36seconds

 

[cookieme]

It wouldn't move beyond the "starting mac osx" loading screen, so I force shutdown and ran Apple Hardware Test. It passed both the standard and extensive tests and no hardware issues were reported. Not sure what's wrong. I'll try and boot up again and see if I can get into osx. Otherwise I'm going to bring it back. Not acceptable that the computer crashes when booted for the first time.

 

[WildPalms]

haha mines 36seconds

heheh, well I do have a lot of stuff in my Login items.

 

[chriswg]

Have you tried a clean install of the OS? Maybe something just got a glitch in it. Since your hardware seems fine, maybe you could just reinstall OS X fresh and all your troubles will be gone. If that doesn't work, then I suppose returning it for another unit is the only choice. Good luck with everything.

 

[cookieme]

Ok some more information. After it failed to start the setup guide and I forced shutdown, I decided to give it another try. I turned on the MPB and after a little while it started the guide and then booted into osx. Now I've run AHT and it passed. I checked all the hardware information using System Profiler and everything looks good. However, when looking at the various logs using console, it looks as if multiple crashes took places when I booted up for the first time (well not really first time - read first post).

Can someone please give me some advise whether I should run any specific tests to verify that the problem I was having was merely a glitch or what I think a result of the salesman's premature shutting down? I just want to be sure that the hardware is functioning properly, so that I can exchange it if necessary.

Also I have a folder at the root level in the finder called "DamagedFiles". It contins 21 aliases to system files.

Below are a number of things I have seen in the log files which I'm not sure whether I should be worried about or not.

console.log
Jun 19 09:35:09 mycomp ntpdate[148]: can't find host time.euro.apple.com\n
Jun 19 09:35:09 mycomp ntpdate[148]: no servers can be used, exiting

This problem with the time server only happens now and then.

Another time I got this:
2007-06-19 09:31:12.921 SyndicationAgent[206] WARNING: BestCalendarDateFromString - can't interpret: 'Tue 19 Jun 2007 00:15:37 -800'

nvram: Error (-1) getting variable - 'boot-args'
Can't access "efi-boot-device" NVRAM variable
Can't access "efi-boot-device" NVRAM variable
Can't access "efi-boot-device" NVRAM variable

CrashReporter
This was happening while I tried booting up but it hanged before I got to the setup guide. This stopped once I was able to boot up and configure the system.

blued.crash.log
Host Name: ???
Date/Time: 2007-06-19 01:56:34.417 -0700
OS Version: 10.4.9 (Build 8Q1058)
Report Version: 4

Command: blued
Path: /usr/sbin/blued
Parent: configd [55]

Version: ??? (???)

PID: 586
Thread: 0

Exception: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (0x0001)
Codes: KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE (0x0002) at 0x00000005

Thread 0 Crashed:
0 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x9028fb9b CFEqual + 32
1 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x90296260 CFArrayContainsValue + 589
2 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x902cf8a4 _CFApplicationPreferencesContainsDomain + 76
3 com.apple.Foundation 0x90ab77eb -[NSUserDefaults removeObjectForKey:] + 87
4 blued 0x0001c5b4 0x1000 + 112052
5 blued 0x000213c0 0x1000 + 132032
6 blued 0x00008d4a 0x1000 + 32074
7 blued 0x00008c71 0x1000 + 31857

Language Chooser.crash.log
Host Name: ???
Date/Time: 2007-06-19 00:49:11.772 -0700
OS Version: 10.4.9 (Build 8Q1058)
Report Version: 4

Command: Language Chooser
Path: /System/Library/CoreServices/Language Chooser.app/Contents/MacOS/Language Chooser
Parent: sh [2]

Version: 1.4.1 (1.4.1)
Build Version: 27
Project Name: LanguageChooser
Source Version: 50400

PID: 69
Thread: 0

Exception: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (0x0001)
Codes: KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE (0x0002) at 0x00000005

Thread 0 Crashed:
0 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x9028fb9b CFEqual + 32
1 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x90296260 CFArrayContainsValue + 589
2 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x902cf8a4 _CFApplicationPreferencesContainsDomain + 76
3 com.apple.Foundation 0x90ab77eb -[NSUserDefaults removeObjectForKey:] + 87
4 com.apple.AppKit 0x922633c0 +[NSMenu _saveTornOffMenus] + 202
5 com.apple.AppKit 0x922631f0 -[NSApplication terminate:] + 448
6 com.apple.LanguageChooser 0x00005d70 0x1000 + 19824
7 com.apple.LanguageChooser 0x00006190 0x1000 + 20880
8 com.apple.LanguageChooser 0x00005d2e 0x1000 + 19758
9 com.apple.Foundation 0x90a6e17b _nsnote_callback + 230
10 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x902cf3e6 __CFXNotificationPost + 345
11 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x902c6bd1 _CFXNotificationPostNotification + 600
12 com.apple.Foundation 0x90a66724 -[NSNotificationCenter postNotificationNamebject:userInfo:] + 121
13 com.apple.Foundation 0x90a6d6c9 -[NSNotificationCenter postNotificationNamebject:] + 55
14 com.apple.LanguageChooser 0x00004858 0x1000 + 14424
15 com.apple.AppKit 0x921c9d88 -[NSApplication sendAction:to:from:] + 107
16 com.apple.AppKit 0x921c9ce1 -[NSControl sendAction:to:] + 101
17 com.apple.AppKit 0x921cbe91 -[NSCell _sendActionFrom:] + 168
18 com.apple.AppKit 0x921de671 -[NSCell trackMouse:inRectfView:untilMouseUp:] + 1271
19 com.apple.AppKit 0x921fc25d -[NSButtonCell trackMouse:inRectfView:untilMouseUp:] + 848
20 com.apple.AppKit 0x921fbb0d -[NSControl mouseDown:] + 757
21 com.apple.AppKit 0x921b93af -[NSWindow sendEvent:] + 5279
22 com.apple.AppKit 0x921ab350 -[NSApplication sendEvent:] + 5023
23 com.apple.AppKit 0x920d5dfe -[NSApplication run] + 547
24 com.apple.AppKit 0x920c9d2f NSApplicationMain + 573
25 com.apple.LanguageChooser 0x00002bd2 0x1000 + 7122
26 com.apple.LanguageChooser 0x00002af9 0x1000 + 6905

Sorry for all the information from the logs, but I can't interpret it, so I'm hoping that someone here knows what was causing the crashing when I was first booting up and if the logs generated are anything to worry about.

What should I do next? Reset the PRAM and SMC and then do a clean install and see how it all goes, i.e. delays, hanging and finally check the logs once that is done to see if they show the same signs?

Thanks for putting up with my problems

 

[DoFoT9]

wow your having some bad problems man. a full reinstall is higly recommended. saving to temporary files could mean harddrive failure. u HAVE to check that out, make sure u have it all backed up

 

[cookieme]

wow your having some bad problems man. a full reinstall is higly recommended. saving to temporary files could mean harddrive failure. u HAVE to check that out, make sure u have it all backed up

Hi DoFoT9. I just booted from the CD and verified the disk and it reported directory errors. I repaired and it reported that it was now ok. I repaired permissions too. It boots very fast both using the cd and the harddrive. Can you please explain what you meant when you said I'm having "some bad problems"?

Btw I was planning on doing a clean install (I always do with a new comp. after I've made sure everything is fine).

Sorry to reiterate, but could all of this have been caused by the salesman's error? It seems as if the initial setup was corrupted or something when he just shutdown.

Btw getting this again:
nvram: Error (-1) getting variable - 'boot-args'
2007-06-19 10:35:21.364 SyndicationAgent[225] WARNING: BestCalendarDateFromString - can't interpret: 'Tue 19 Jun 2007 01:09:17 -800'

What is the suggested procedure:

1. Reset SMC then on boot
2. PRAM then
3. Clean install

Should I reset the SMC and PRAM at all or just do the clean install?

Thanks for your continued help.

 

[Sopranino]

Hi DoFoT9. I just booted from the CD and verified the disk and it reported directory errors. I repaired and it reported that it was now ok. I repaired permissions too. It boots very fast both using the cd and the harddrive. Can you please explain what you meant when you said I'm having "some bad problems"?

Btw I was planning on doing a clean install (I always do with a new comp. after I've made sure everything is fine).

Sorry to reiterate, but could all of this have been caused by the salesman's error? It seems as if the initial setup was corrupted or something when he just shutdown.

Btw getting this again:
nvram: Error (-1) getting variable - 'boot-args'
2007-06-19 10:35:21.364 SyndicationAgent[225] WARNING: BestCalendarDateFromString - can't interpret: 'Tue 19 Jun 2007 01:09:17 -800'

What is the suggested procedure:

1. Reset SMC then on boot
2. PRAM then
3. Clean install

Should I reset the SMC and PRAM at all or just do the clean install?

Thanks for your continued help.

Although a corrupted factory install is not common it can happen. You've done the right steps so far prior to running to Apple and it looks like it has been effective. There are several things that you might want to look at doing.

1) Now that your system is running, use it for a little while. (about a day)
2) Note any major system errors that occur (if any, I suspect that you'll find that everything is working fine)
3) You indicate that you've run the AHT and didn't find any errors, this is a 'good thing'.
4) Before installing any software and making mods to the system I would now re-install the OS. A few people might make the argument that if the system is running fine that you don't need to do a system re-install. I would state that although the system appears to be fine right now that there are no guarantees that there aren't any more corrupt file problems still in hiding. So, I would advise that the colon be tested by an individual robot.

5) Shutdown, reboot, and then test some applications with an eye towards ensuring that nothing bubbles over.

 

[eenu]

i'm sure i told you what to do..... now you have already done the first thing i said so why dont you just do the second step!!!

 

[DoFoT9]

Hi DoFoT9. I just booted from the CD and verified the disk and it reported directory errors. I repaired and it reported that it was now ok. I repaired permissions too. It boots very fast both using the cd and the harddrive. Can you please explain what you meant when you said I'm having "some bad problems"?

Btw I was planning on doing a clean install (I always do with a new comp. after I've made sure everything is fine).

Sorry to reiterate, but could all of this have been caused by the salesman's error? It seems as if the initial setup was corrupted or something when he just shutdown.

Btw getting this again:
nvram: Error (-1) getting variable - 'boot-args'
2007-06-19 10:35:21.364 SyndicationAgent[225] WARNING: BestCalendarDateFromString - can't interpret: 'Tue 19 Jun 2007 01:09:17 -800'

.

bad problems as in the harddrive could be faulty, some sectors mightnt be readable. im not really sure but judging by that code......id get it checked out.

im also thinking, maybe, because of the boot problems, it could be some firmware problem?? im not sure i may be wwaaaaaaaay off. just a suggestion

 

[cookieme]

Although a corrupted factory install is not common it can happen. You've done the right steps so far prior to running to Apple and it looks like it has been effective. There are several things that you might want to look at doing.

1) Now that your system is running, use it for a little while. (about a day)
2) Note any major system errors that occur (if any, I suspect that you'll find that everything is working fine)
3) You indicate that you've run the AHT and didn't find any errors, this is a 'good thing'.
4) Before installing any software and making mods to the system I would now re-install the OS. A few people might make the argument that if the system is running fine that you don't need to do a system re-install. I would state that although the system appears to be fine right now that there are no guarantees that there aren't any more corrupt file problems still in hiding. So, I would advise that the colon be tested by an individual robot.

5) Shutdown, reboot, and then test some applications with an eye towards ensuring that nothing bubbles over.

Sopranino, your reply is very helpful because it confirms what I've been thinking. The installation was very likely corrupted by the salesman and not at the factory. All the steps I've taken once it booted up has been to make sure that there was no hardware damage as a result. Maybe it's just paranoia and my inability to interpret log files but there seemed to be so many "errors", i.e. with the nvram, ntp server, best calender thingy etc.

So, I would advise that the colon be tested by an individual robot.

Sorry Sopranino, but what do you mean?

Ok, going to do a clean install now and I'll report back. Again no one answered, but should I reset the SMC and PRAM before installation or is this an unnecessary step? I have read Apple's troubleshooting procedure, but is it harmful to just reset it all before a clean install, so if there is any corruption it's cleared straight away?