Open Radar

 
Summary:
I still don't fully understand how to trigger this, but most of the time when I restart my Mac it hangs on the grey screen with the Apple logo and spinner. It seems to only happen after I've been using it for a while, and having some other problem (see rdar://15908523) but that could just be a coincidence—it's rare that I would restart if I wasn't having a problem. I've tried many different things—holding down shift for safe mode, waiting for hours, simply trying again, checking the disk for problems and repairing it, zapping PRAM, making sure the startup disk was selected, even unplugging my AirPort base station… nothing helped. Before today I was only able to fix the problem by reinstalling OS X. After doing that, it was fine—for a while.

Today I discovered something very interesting: I went into recovery mode, and tossed the file /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.airport.preferences.plist. It booted perfectly after that.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Restart the computer.

Expected Results:
It should boot up, after displaying the grey screen with the Apple logo and spinner for just a second or two.

Actual Results:
It hangs on the grey Apple logo screen indefinitely. I've tried letting it sit for hours and nothing happens. On rare occasions simply forcing a shut down and trying again would work, but most of the time I would have to reinstall OS X.

Version:
10.9.1 current—but I've also had this problem with the latest 10.9.2 beta that's available to developers.

Notes:
It's possible this bug has some connection to rdar://15908523—though the workaround I discovered for that bug did not help with this one. I'm attaching the "bad" AirPort configuration file, though I don't know if it actually has anything to do with the AirPort setup, or if it's just something it's trying to do after it has an internet connection that's causing the problem. It's worth noting that unplugging my AirPort base station did not seem to help at all.

Configuration:
13" MacBook Pro (Late 2013), 2.6GHZ Intel Core i5, 8GB RAM, 512GB SSD. I've also had the same problem with a 2012 MacBook Pro, similar specs.

Attachments:
'BAD-com.apple.airport.preferences.plist' was successfully uploaded.