Early 2006 MacBook Pro will not boot until keyboard button is pressed

[Don Quixote]

My MacBook Pro is a Core Duo, NOT a Core 2 Duo. It is 32-bit, Model Identifier MacBookPro1,1 1.83 GHz with 2 GB of RAM.

I use rEFIt 0.14 for a boot menu. On the inernal drive are Mac OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard, Ubuntu 11.04 and Windows XP SP 3.

I have booted it with two external USB drives, one a PNY Class 10 16 GB MicroSDHC card in a Dynex DX-CRMN1 card reader, the other a 16 GB Micro Center store brand USB Flash drive.

The PNY card has hrev42888 and the Micro Center drive has hrev42890.

After I select the boot device and partition in rEFIt, there is a blank screen for a few seconds with a rapidly blinking underscore in the top-left corner.

But then the book appears to hang when the row of grey boot icons appears. However, the boot has not actually hung. If I wait about twenty seconds, then press any keyboard key (on either the internal keyboard, or an external USB keyboard), after a few seconds the color icons light up and the boot appears normally.

If I press a key before this twenty second delay, nothing happens. I've timed this several times. I may be off by a couple seconds but the requirement that I wait before tapping a key is completely repeatible.

Just now I was trying to get you a syslog, but for some reason the boot hangs right about when the app server starts up. I get a blue screen with a white bar across the top. The hand pointer appears but is frozen in the middle of the screen. I cannot get into KDL.

I will report this last as a separate bug, I just wanted to let you know why I'm not attaching any logs yet.

My MacBook Pro has no serial port, in Apple's Infinite Wisdom. Is there an alternative way of getting debugging output on it?

[Don Quixote]

Mac OS X System Profiler Report (gzipped). View this on a Mac for hardware config

[kvdman]

re:

"Just now I was trying to get you a syslog, but for some reason the boot hangs right about when the app server starts up. I get a blue screen with a white bar across the top."

this seems to affect at least a couple models of MacBooks... see ticket #8012

maybe you can add your log there, or link back here.

[waddlesplash]

Please retest with a recent nightly.