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I updated my 2007 non-unibody Macbook Pro with 4gb RAM and 2.2ghz Core 2 Duo. It successfully installed, then the spinner froze on boot and the computer wouldn't start. I ended up just reinstalling Mavericks from scratch and starting over. But now, a few days later, I was just doing random stuff and the computer froze. It usually isn't a problem and has never been a problem for me before. This time, when I rebooted, the spinner on the boot screen froze again, and it just sits there for 5 minutes then shuts off. I can't boot in safe mode and I don't want to reinstall Mavericks and all my apps from scratch again. Is there anything I can do to get this thing to work??? Any commands I can run from recovery? Thanks ahead of time!

UPDATE: I booted into recovery and restored from the most recent Time Machine backup. It told me to reboot so I did, and then I got this message. I didn't boot into verbose, it just did this. http://pastebin.com/rFaUtWfN

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If you can start up from the recovery partition (by holding command-R), try to verify the drive and the OS X volume from Disk Utility. If you can start up in verbose mode (by holding command-V), copy any messages that seem relevant here. – user495470 Oct 29 '13 at 11:42
    
Never mind. I couldn't wait to get it fixed because it was interfering with school so I just reinstalled OSX from recovery. – silvertriclops Oct 30 '13 at 21:56
up vote 1 down vote accepted

After four days of testing, I found out that it was when I turned off the wireless (Airport). My laptop would totally freeze within seconds and every time I would try to reboot. When it still froze even after I rolled back to 10.8 I knew it wasn't a hardware issue.

I found a fix on day 5: Do not turn off your Airport, Turn off your modem!

Seriously, if it happens to you, get your Mac on target mode and browse your hard drive to:

/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/

and rename the file "com.apple.airport.preferences.plist" to something like "com.apple.airport.preferences.plist~bad" and reboot.

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Thanks! This worked great for me. I just have to remember to keep the wifi on, or to write some sort of script that turns it on before shutting it down. Again, thanks so much! – silvertriclops Nov 17 '13 at 1:54
    
I'll post more detailed instructions as well at the bottom of this thread. I ended up doing it via Terminal in recovery, which works just as well if you don't have a second Mac or firewire cable. – silvertriclops Nov 18 '13 at 14:10
    
^^ that never happened because school. Anyways, you can boot into recovery, start a terminal, cd to /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/, and remove com.apple.airport.preferences.plist. That should fix it. – silvertriclops Dec 7 '14 at 3:42
up vote 0 down vote

If you are in school, and have it running I would say keep it the way it is until you have some time to look at it. In my experience when you are having your specific issue with boots to spinning gear, then shuts down after a while it is an issue with the hard drive in specific. By the time that it gets to that gear in the boot process it is loading the boot.efi, and kernel extensions (Basically your actual software)... Meaning that it is trying to read what is on that disk. Which by your specs of your computer (Silver Key MBP) if that is your original drive.. Is probably getting pretty close to kicking the bucket. But you've done the smart thing and backed up. So, if you get more issues (slow (yes it's a 2006-07 computer it's gonna be slow) hard to start up, force shut down after sleep) it might be time for that new hard drive. Check out AASPs' to replace it, you WILL break your keyboard if you try it the first time. locate.apple.com will send you to a place that will do it, at cost. But you can get a pretty cheap drive on newegg.com

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