I have restarted, run disk utility, cleared SMC and NVRAM. I hold down the shift key upon restart (wired keyboard) and it brings me straight to the ordinary log in screen. Any other ideas how to get into safe mode?
When attempting to log into my account, the little white bar goes across the screen, fills up, then actually backs off and freezes. When attempting to go into guest mode, computer freezes upon pressing the "restart" button.
Wish I knew the answer as well, but it clearly installed all by itself through an automatic OS update.
-v is optional, with an assumption that you would like a verbose view of the safe boot.
After safe boot has served its purpose: to boot in normal mode, either reset NVRAM or reuse Recovery OS to set what's required in NVRAM.
Wwith a MacBookPro8,2 booting Sierra from a hard disk drive, limited to USB 2.0: the safe boot bug may be intermittent, not consistently reproducible; as far as I recall, the Shift key did work as expected on at least one occasion.
Good luck
Postscripts
Matt, is the machine still without a Recovery OS? If so, ignore my suggestion (sorry).
Also, to clarify: my earlier post was about the prohibition. This post is about the Shift key not resulting in safe boot.
I am also having the same issue, I will try this recommended fix above and see if it helps. I know mine was due to an update as I just finished one and had more of another one to finish. Please post a fix is someone finds this doesn't work as recommended above. Thank you in advance.
I am not able to login to safe mode, recovery mode wouldn't recognise my time machine backup. Basically I have converted my MacBook into a brick. Not able to figure out if there could be a hard reset of macbook pro mid 2010.
> … shift key upon restart (wired keyboard) and it brings me straight to the ordinary log in screen. …
With 16A286a I have not reproduced the problem.
