Comment 33 for bug 1284085

Nope, processor.nocst=1 does not help. It still hangs reading the CPU info and that's it. The only way to boot the mac-type images in such state is using nr_cpus=1 in the boot options, which is pretty far from optional... I honestly don't remember how that happened but a few weeks ago I was stuck in this loop and eventually I just shut down my Macbook Air and in the next morning it was working again after the nr_cpus and processor.nocst tricks I've tried the night before. I wonder if a "clean" shut down after a successful boot cleans something up?

Anyway, I had this problem again today and I'm not running with a single core... until I have the time to back up and install the regular image from the site, not the crippled mac-type one. That's some really poor phrasing on the web site, it's getting people's machines in a broken state because it's not clear at all which image they should be downloading.