Lion update 10.7.5 crashed my Mac Pro

Question

After completion of the 10.7.5 update from the Software updater, my Mac Pro would not boot from the 10.7.5 startup drive.  I have 4 hard drives in the machine.  A 1TB startup disk running Lion, two 1.5TB drives in a mirrored RAID config with OS X Snow Leopard (the last Apple OS that would allow a RAID'd startup drive), and a 3TB disk configured as a Time Machine backing up the other three drives.  I've been wrestling the problem for over a week now.  So far I've observed:
I do not think its a bad hard disk:
I bought a new 1TB Seagate drive to replace the failed 1TB Western Digital thinking I had a hardware problem.  The Seagate loaded Lion 10.7 fine and booted fine, until downloading the 10.7.5 update from the "Software Update" in System Preferences.  Same result.  Dead computer as soon as the install completed and attempted to boot.  The crash screen is solid grey with a text warning in the middle that reads something like hit a key to try again.  It's an infinite loop from there...multiple failed boots leading to "hit a key to try again." 
Curious thing, I can use the failed drive, just not as a startup disk:
So I pulled the Lion drive and booted from my old RAID'd pair running Snow Leopard.  Ran great, except of course all the applications that no longer run in Snow Leopard etc.  I set Snow Leopard as the startup disk, and rebooted with the Lion drive pushed back in.  System booted fine into Snow Leopard and I could see the Lion drive, open it, move files around etc. 
Mountain Lion didn't work either:
Then I thought, well, I wanted to move to Mountain Lion anyhow, no time better than now!  I formatted the Seagate that had the bad 10.7.5, and installed a fresh copy of Mountain Lion.  Guess what?  Same result.  Infinite loop of grey screen of death.  But like before, if I booted into Snow Leopard, I can look into the Mountain Lion disk like I could with Lion 10.7.5. 
Stuck with 10.7.4:
Next step was another format of the Seagate.  Re-installed Lion 10.7, but this time only updated it to 10.7.4 (vice 10.7.5).  Now I'm going through all the pain of restoring with Time Machine, reconfiguring software, and typing in keys. 
The final situation is still worse than I was before I started:
Somewhere along the line, bluetooth stopped working ("bluetooth not available"), even after trying a SMC reset.  Also, I think mutliple initializations of my apple ID in the cloud resulted in password insanity on our iPhones and iPad...even after typing in a password, they only seem to work for a day before I get another pop up on my iPhone that my passord is wrong. 
Maybe the "incremental" 10.7.5 will work?
Apple released the 10.7.5 update on 19 Sep 12.  This is the update that caused all this pain.  I noticed there is an incremental update to 10.7.5 released 4 Oct 12.  Does anyone know if it will fix all this?  I'm not to excited about pushing the "I believe" button again...
Frustrated in the Corn Fields,
Jeff Brown

Answer 1

I have had exactly the same problem on my older 17" MBP. (I think its a 2009) Upgraded from 10.7.3 >> 10.7.5 necessary to synch with Iphone etc and on powerup you simply get the screen "You will need to hold down the power button....
Formated, Re-installed and PRAM's all to no avail.
Finally downloaded Mountain Lion and created Boot USB, again performed clean install, this time 1/2 way through the installation (Im guessing after it has created the rescuse sector and re-boots) it came up with Grey Screen - Computer needs to re-boot itself.
Was able to continue the installation however whenever it booted up it would come up with the same grey screen - computer needs to re-start....
Now after 3 days I have returned to Lion 10.7.3 frustrated and £13.xx out of pocket, unable to synch with Iphone
Grrrrrrrr