Backup successful - unable to boot

[kahmedsid]

On a brand new mid-2009 15" MBP, installed Snow Leopard and applied all updates as of last night (11/10/09). This morning, connected an external drive in enclosure via USB and performed a full backup. Success!

Turned the system off and rebooted off of the external USB drive. Success!

Swapped the external drive with the internal drive, disconnected everything except power and rebooted. See the Apple logo and the spinning progress indicator, unable to boot.

Did everything mentioned above twice with exact same results.

Any pointers?

[dnanian]

Are you sure you were running from the USB drive?

[kahmedsid]

The first time I did it, I didn't even remember to boot with the drive still in the USB enclosure. Next time, I was like I am not going through the hassle of opening up the system, replacing drives, etc. so let me boot off of the USB drive first. And, it booted off perfectly fine. I breathed a sigh of relief and swapped the drive and crossed my fingers that life is going to be good. But it wasn't.

Btw, the drive is named the same, Macintosh HD. If you can suggest looking at any log files, etc. I can boot off of the original drive as USB and look at files in the problematic ones.

Appreciate your help.

[dnanian]

If it boots with USB it should certainly work internally. Try starting up while holding down Shift to see if "Safe Boot" works.

[kahmedsid]

Turned off, pressed the start button and immediately held down the SHIFT button until I saw the apple logo, the spinning progress indicator and an additional bar type progress indicator just underneath it. The bar went almost about 1/4th of the way and then disappeared leaving behind just the apple logo and the spinning indicator. It's sitting at that ....

[dnanian]

A bar type indicator? That's usually an indication of a firmware update. How long have you left it at the spinner?