Christian Zibreg, writing for iDownloadBlog:

We previously discussed how booting your Mac into OS X’s Safe Mode can help troubleshoot various issues with your computer. In more obscure situations and borderline cases, however, Safe Mode may not be enough to understand why your Mac freezes or crashes during the system boot process.

Enter OS X’s Verbose Mode.

Not only does Verbose Mode makes it easy to access detailed status messages as your Mac is starting up, but also lets you see what’s really going on behind the scenes and watch as OS X loads kernel extensions and other startup items.

This is useful stuff. Worth bookmarking and passing along to other Mac support folks.