Macbook hangs during login [and a fix]
anand June 11th, 2007
The shiny new macbook
My wife got a shiny new macbook at work. She was able to login just fine at work. She brings it home, she was able to login once. Then I set up airport on the macbook to talk to my airport extreme “802.11 n” version. Every thing is hunky dory.
And then she rebooted the machine - the macbook would hang at login. It would just sit there for 30+ mins, nothing would happen. Umpteen reboots later, we just gave up.
Of course she tries it at work and it automagically works. We tried to narrow down the problem and during debugging powered down the airport extreme. We reboot the macbook and presto - it works.
The fix
The fix turned out to be pretty simple actually. I simply installed the 802.11n drivers and airport utility that came with the airport extreme. We rebooted everything and logins just work fine. Looks like the default 802.11g/b/a drivers in the macbook aren’t compatible with the airport extreme. At least it should die gracefully :).
Update
The fix was short lived and it started to hang again. Apple support suggested re installing OS. That didn’t help. In the meantime, I read about a similar issue during logout with airport disk and tried that suggestion [disconnect during logout].
I also deleted airport disk passwords in keychain access. I also changed airport disk utility not to connect to airport disk during login. That seems to have fixed the problem. I will know after using the system for a few more days.
This SUCKS.