So, at present my mid-2012 Air is a bit of a brick. Safari had a very beach-ball-y tab on Friday evening that wouldn't close, or be force-quit, or kill'd etc. so I did a hard restart by holding down the power button. It then failed to restart, getting past the initial FileVault login screen (I've checked that this seems to require a correct password - an incorrect password results in a shaky box and a request to try a bit harder to remember what it was) before displaying a grey screen with a spinning cog, and eventually a grey-circle-with-a-diagonal-bar-across-it sign. Verbose mode looks pretty standard, up until the following is logged:



The final line keeps getting logged every few minutes until I get bored.

I've tried booting into recovery mode, with the aim being to just zap the drive and restore from TimeMachine backup or re-install, but when prompted to 'Enter a password to unlock the disk "Macintosh HD"' and providing my (known good) user password I get a shakeup box. There is no Firmware password and I have my FileVault recovery key. Any suggestions for A) What's wrong or B) How to zap the machine and put it into a working state?

Ta.

A hardware test (the long one) showed up nothing, as expected.

Do you have a recovery disk partition you could boot into?

I believe that's what's used when you try to re-install OS-X from the recovery tools. I'll have a look after dinner. Thanks.

Boot in to safe mode then clear the finder pref files.

I don't seem to be able to boot into safe mode (that's pressing shift on startup isn't it?) - I have the normal problem of the grey sign after a while (having entered the disk unlock password)

I've not made any progress with this the last few nights, and as of Saturday I'll be pretty much confined to home or work for 11 days, so does anyone have any recommendations for anywhere in London that may be able to take a look? I'd try another Genius appointment, but not seem to be available.

Question also asked [url="http://apple.stackexchange.com/q/103927/2491"]here[/url] so hopefully we can find out what's going on...

I've replied on Twitter but if you need it you can ship it to my office and I'll look at it for you.
I've also got ml on USB stick so could try booting from that and trashing the existing partition

All fixed, ready to collect

Was it a case of zapping the drive with a live Linux distro/tool and then re-installing from USB?

Boot from ML usb, use terminal to repartition the disk then install fresh