diff --git a/CHANGES.txt b/CHANGES.txt
index c593c21efe6..db7d8a4fc37 100644
--- a/CHANGES.txt
+++ b/CHANGES.txt
@@ -32,6 +32,7 @@ Trunk (unreleased changes)
     HADOOP-1746 Clean up findbugs warnings
     HADOOP-1757 Bloomfilters: single argument constructor, use enum for bloom
                 filter types
+    HADOOP-1802 Startup scripts should wait until hdfs as cleared 'safe mode'
 
 
 Below are the list of changes before 2007-08-18
diff --git a/bin/start-hbase.sh b/bin/start-hbase.sh
index d0b47dc2444..3060c9e134e 100755
--- a/bin/start-hbase.sh
+++ b/bin/start-hbase.sh
@@ -32,5 +32,11 @@ bin=`cd "$bin"; pwd`
 . "$bin"/hbase-config.sh
 
 # start hbase daemons
+"${HADOOP_HOME}"/bin/hadoop dfsadmin -safemode wait
+errCode=$?
+if [ $errCode -ne 0 ]
+then
+  exit $errCode
+fi
 "$bin"/hbase-daemon.sh --config="${HADOOP_CONF_DIR}" --hbaseconfig="${HBASE_CONF_DIR}" master start
 "$bin"/hbase-daemons.sh --config="${HADOOP_CONF_DIR}" --hbaseconfig="${HBASE_CONF_DIR}" regionserver start