[Kurt Todoroff]

I read your most recent message, and, I decided to perform more than a perfunctory review of Jason Snell's article.

I booted into Verbose mode.
I launched SD!.
I performed two backups of the internal hard drive.
I quit SD!.
I restarted the system.

The display became black, immediately. The arrow remained on the screen. Five minutes later, the arrow disappeared. I wiggled the trackball. The arrow reappeared on the black display.

Interesting note, with the arrow visible on the black screen, if I wiggle the trackball quickly, the arrow becomes large, as I would expect it to during normal operations. It seem that, despite a black display and a visible arrow, the system has not logged out of my User account. I wonder if the Finder is running, or, has quit, at this point.

I waited fifteen minutes. The iMac still had not restarted. Then, I performed a hard power down. Up to this point, I had not seen any verbose mode data on the display during shutdown.

Thirty seconds later, I powered the iMac up.

I launched the console. I clicked on SYSTEM LOG QUERIES > All Messages.

I scrolled down to the time index that I remembered commencing the restart. I'm not familiar with the log entries. Would you like to take a look at them? Some of them contain references to SD! I can send the entire log, or, I can send a small snapshot of the few seconds before and the few seconds after the restart event.