Posted: 9/29/2009 12:10:10 PM EDT
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A friend of mine's MacBook won't boot, so she handed it to me to fix, ha.
It starts, goes to the gray screen with the apple. Then the processing wheel starts and just doesn't stop. She let it do this for ten minutes before telling me about it, so it is going for at least that long. When I press option on boot, it gives me the option of booting in OS X or XP. I have tried to use the Shift method of starting in Safe Mode with no luck at all––apple shows up, but the processing wheel doesn't. I have reset PRAM and SMC also with no luck. Ideas? I haven't attempted to start in Windows yet because I am in class and her sound is on. |
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Boot from the OS X install DVD... Check it out with the disk utility, reinstall if necessary... I haven't had a serious problem like that with OS X unless I was messing around with stuff I shouldn't have. But back in the MacOS 8 days, my old PowerMac would crash like clockwork twice a year and I'd have to format the drive and reinstall. Backups were worthless - old CD-R drives were slow as molasses and all my Zip drives had the click of death(fuck you Iomega). |
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Quoted: 1 down load the latest combo update from apple 2 start the MB from a fire wire drive 3 install the update. 9 times out of 10 that will work. can you boot in single user mode hold down command + s key while booting? if you can type in fsck at the command prompt I bet a permissions fix would help. |
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I think the easiest thing is being overlooked. Reset the pram.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379 Resetting PRAM and NVRAM Shut down the computer. Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command, Option, P, and R. You will need to hold these keys down simultaneously in step 4. Turn on the computer. Press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys. You must press this key combination before the gray screen appears. Hold the keys down until the computer restarts and you hear the startup sound for the second time. Release the keys. Your computer's PRAM and the NVRAM are reset to the default values. The clock settings may be reset to a default date on some models. |
Is the hard drive new? Is the installation of OS X fresh. If so, it can take a while, but 10 minutes seems too long. Nothing you can do except buy a PC 
Try an Archive install and if that fails, backup ALL data and do an erase install. You may need to redo the windows partition in either of these cases. Does the Windows partition load ok? If not the HD may be gone to shit. |
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Quoted: I think the easiest thing is being overlooked. Reset the pram. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379 Resetting PRAM and NVRAM Shut down the computer. Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command, Option, P, and R. You will need to hold these keys down simultaneously in step 4. Turn on the computer. Press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys. You must press this key combination before the gray screen appears. Hold the keys down until the computer restarts and you hear the startup sound for the second time. Release the keys. Your computer's PRAM and the NVRAM are reset to the default values. The clock settings may be reset to a default date on some models. He already did that. 1st post.  |
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Quoted:
I think the easiest thing is being overlooked. Reset the pram. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379 Resetting PRAM and NVRAM Shut down the computer. Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command, Option, P, and R. You will need to hold these keys down simultaneously in step 4. Turn on the computer. Press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys. You must press this key combination before the gray screen appears. Hold the keys down until the computer restarts and you hear the startup sound for the second time. Release the keys. Your computer's PRAM and the NVRAM are reset to the default values. The clock settings may be reset to a default date on some models. I have reset PRAM and SMC also with no luck.
I think you may have overlooked something simple as well, reading 
ETA: Beat me to it shizrade. These damn forums move to fast 
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| Spoke to her for a moment. She has "a lot" of room left on the HD. The last update she did was for iTune earlier today with no issues. She installed Quicktime with no issues. Computer wouldn't wake up when she opened it at the beginning of class, then she restarted it, and here we are. |
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if my above suggestion does not work you can use Disk Warrior.
its not free but it beats losing all of her files. saved a lot of folks at my work from losing data when there HD had bad sectors. (if it can't fix the directory, you can still copy her user folder to a external disk) does she have a recent backup? |