Macbook won't boot, stuck on apple logo.

[mattcam]

Hey,

So this morning i turned on my alu macbook (2.0ghz, 2gb ram) and i'm stuck on the apple logo and spinny thing at the bottom, i've searched here and the apple site but can't find a solution. PLease help!

[RemarkabLee]

Hey,

So this morning i turned on my alu macbook (2.0ghz, 2gb ram) and i'm stuck on the apple logo and spinny thing at the bottom, i've searched here and the apple site but can't find a solution. PLease help!

Do you have any devices plugged in, such as an external drive or an iPod? If so, remove them and try again.

[mattcam]

Nothing is plugged in, the battery was full iniatially but after a i let it sit on that screen for a while its down to about half give or take.

[RemarkabLee]

Try restarting in Safe Mode

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1455

[mattcam]

Any idea how long booting through safe mode should take? its been about 15 mins of blue screen with the spinning thing underneath

[mattcam]

Ok so whats happening is the wheel at the bottom spins the mouse appears in the top left hand corner for a second, the screen blinks and the wheel reappears..... is this supposed to be happening?

[RemarkabLee]

15 minutes sounds like too long.

Is the hard disk active? It may be reparing disk permissions which you should let it complete.

If not, try resetting your PRAM: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379

or SMC: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1411

By the way, I'm getting this from here: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1365

[AdeFowler]

Okay, shut down the Mac (hold down power key)
Restart whilst holding down Command-S

The screen should turn black and load some text

At the prompt type

fsck -fy and press Return

Hopefully some repairs will be performed.

At the prompt type

reboot and press Return

Cross your fingers ;)

[mattcam]

the hard disk appears to be active, i can feel the vibration and its getting warm.

so i should just let it run for the moment?

[DPA]

15 minutes wouldn't be long for me. It all depends on what type of files you have on you hard drive. About how many gigabytes of applications do you have? My MacBook Pro takes about 15-18 minutes to boot up in Safe Mode and I have a ton of intense applications like Final Cut Studio, Logic Studio, After Effects, Dreamweaver, Flash, MS Word (believe it or not, it's a pretty big app), Photoshop and others which adds up about 12GB plus another 20GB in music and media in iTunes and it has to load my files on my 3 external drives via FireWire 800. I doubt you have this many apps on a MacBook but it's possible.

David

[leodavinci0]

You can always start up in verbose mode (hold down "apple" and "v"). This way you can see your computer loading. If it stops reporting, and the HDD spins down, then you may have some corrupted filesystems or something. Use the forums linked by the commenter above for more information about fixing this through disk utility and other means.

[mattcam]

15 minutes wouldn't be long for me. It all depends on what type of files you have on you hard drive. About how many gigabytes of applications do you have? My MacBook Pro takes about 15-18 minutes to boot up in Safe Mode and I have a ton of intense applications like Final Cut Studio, Logic Studio, After Effects, Dreamweaver, Flash, MS Word (believe it or not, it's a pretty big app), Photoshop and others which adds up about 12GB plus another 20GB in music and media in iTunes and it has to load my files on my 3 external drives via FireWire 800. I doubt you have this many apps on a MacBook but it's possible.

David

the biggest apps i have on it would be ms office and football manager 09. in terms of music video, maybe 30gb. it doesn't have to load anything from any external drives.

[mattcam]

Okay, shut down the Mac (hold down power key)
Restart whilst holding down Command-S

The screen should turn black and load some text

At the prompt type

fsck -fy and press Return

Hopefully some repairs will be performed.

At the prompt type

reboot and press Return

Cross your fingers ;)

ok i did this and the exact same thing is happening again, with the blue screen loading then the mouse appearing for a second before flicking back to loading again....

[DPA]

MS Office is, in somewhat of a surprise, a suite of pretty big applications. How much RAM do you have on your MacBook and is it a SSD drive? I don't see how it is taking that long to boot up in Safe Mode. Did you get it to boot yet? I think you should try SoutherBoy's fix, it sounds like it will work to me.

David

[RemarkabLee]

ok i did this and the exact same thing is happening again, with the blue screen loading then the mouse appearing for a second before flicking back to loading again....

Try booting using verbose mode as leodavinci0 suggests. Hopefully a message will help you diagnose better.

[mattcam]

MS Office is, in somewhat of a surprise, a suite of pretty big applications. How much RAM do you have on your MacBook and is it a SSD drive? I don't see how it is taking that long to boot up in Safe Mode. Did you get it to boot yet? I think you should try SoutherBoy's fix, it sounds like it will work to me.

David


i've 2gb of ram and its the standard 160gb drive. i tried Southernboy's fix but to no avail.

[mattcam]

Try booting using verbose mode as leodavinci0 suggests. Hopefully a message will help you diagnose better.

I'll do that when i get home in a couple of hours, can't do anymore now as the battery is nearly gone, thanks for all the help, i'll post an update when i get home...

[DPA]

You are booting up to Mac OS X, right? There shouldn't be a blue screen when you boot in Safe Boot. I think you should try a Archive and Install. It's helpful if you have an external drive, FireWire especially. If you have a FireWire cable and another Mac, you could also try booting your MacBook to your other Mac. When you boot up hold the T key and your Mac should boot up to a screensaver with a moving FireWire logo. Make sure you have the FireWire cord running from your MacBook to your other Mac and then the MacBook should be shown as a drive on your other Mac. You can then copy files and even try to sort out the problem there. You can run Disk Utility on the MacBook too. Refer to this page (http://www.techtalkpoint.com/articles/booting-your-apple-mac-troubleshooting-startup-problems/) for more information.

David

[RemarkabLee]

You are booting up to Mac OS X, right? There shouldn't be a blue screen when you boot in Safe Boot. I think you should try a Archive and Install. It's helpful if you have an external drive, FireWire especially. If you have a FireWire cable and another Mac, you could also try booting your MacBook to your other Mac. When you boot up hold the T key and your Mac should boot up to a screensaver with a moving FireWire logo. Make sure you have the FireWire cord running from your MacBook to your other Mac and then the MacBook should be shown as a drive on your other Mac. You can then copy files and even try to sort out the problem there. You can run Disk Utility on the MacBook too. Refer to this page (http://www.techtalkpoint.com/articles/booting-your-apple-mac-troubleshooting-startup-problems/) for more information.

David

Sigh... Target Disk Mode on the MacBook.... you will be missed... :'(

[DPA]

Sigh... Target Disk Mode on the MacBook.... you will be missed... :'(

Your right, I totally forgot there's no more FW ports on the new Unibody MacBook. That's a big sigh...

David

[mattcam]

You can always start up in verbose mode (hold down "apple" and "v"). This way you can see your computer loading. If it stops reporting, and the HDD spins down, then you may have some corrupted filesystems or something. Use the forums linked by the commenter above for more information about fixing this through disk utility and other means.

Ok i'm doing this at the moment its skipping between a blue screen and a black screen, the black screen is saying that the time the computers name and a crash report number thats going up as the new crash screen pops up. Saved crash report to ....

any other suggestions, should i do the pram or smc things yet should i?

[leodavinci0]

Ok i'm doing this at the moment its skipping between a blue screen and a black screen, the black screen is saying that the time the computers name and a crash report number thats going up as the new crash screen pops up. Saved crash report to ....

any other suggestions, should i do the pram or smc things yet should i?

Could you provide more info on what verbose mode is showing you? It should list several processes, and eventually get to one it either gets stuck on, or explicitly states this is what crashed. If it doesn't even get to the point of trying to load any processes, and instead just lists that a whole bunch of things are crashing, then this doesn't bode well, and may be a HDD reading problem (if in fact you didn't do anything to the computer to cause this error). I can't say until you provide more data.

[mattcam]

Could you provide more info on what verbose mode is showing you? It should list several processes, and eventually get to one it either gets stuck on, or explicitly states this is what crashed. If it doesn't even get to the point of trying to load any processes, and instead just lists that a whole bunch of things are crashing, then this doesn't bode well, and may be a HDD reading problem (if in fact you didn't do anything to the computer to cause this error). I can't say until you provide more data.

i can't remember exactly what it said but i always stopped at the first line, and it had the 3 values at 0 0 0.

do you know what i mean?

[mattcam]

ok so i did an archive and install. that seems to have fixed the problem, i hope, is there anything i should do like run a diagnostic tool or something?

i've already started with the updates.

[RemarkabLee]

Your right, I totally forgot there's no more FW ports on the new Unibody MacBook. That's a big sigh...

David

It was just a general comment, not specifically to do with this issue. I wasn't sure what model the OP was using, so don't take that as a jibe :)

[RemarkabLee]

ok so i did an archive and install. that seems to have fixed the problem, i hope, is there anything i should do like run a diagnostic tool or something?

i've already started with the updates.

TechTool worth using if you have a copy?

Also if you have Apple Protection, try using the diag disc that comes with it. I'm not sure if that is TechTool or something else...

[ericmschwanke]

When I turn the computer on It sits at the apple screen and the loader keeps spinning.

I have looked through MAC forums and tried doing the following to help with the problem.

- Resetting the system management controller - (undo battery hold power button for 5-7 seconds and restart)

- Reset the PRAM (turned on and held Command-Option-P-R keys)

- Restart whilt holding down Command-S and At the prompt type -fsck -fy ....and press Return At the prompt type reboot and press Return

and finally
-verbose mode (hold down "apple" and "v") when doing this it ran for about 20 min and at the end kept repeating siocprotoattach_in6: en0 error=17 until eventually turning itself off.

Any quick tips would help because I just dont want to pay alot of money to the MAC GUYS in town to get a quick answer and possibly just replace the HD which I could do myself.


I no longer have the install discs for my mac, I lost them when I recently moved.

[farhaand]

Okay, shut down the Mac (hold down power key)
Restart whilst holding down Command-S

The screen should turn black and load some text

At the prompt type

fsck -fy and press Return

Hopefully some repairs will be performed.

At the prompt type

reboot and press Return

Cross your fingers ;)
i tried this but it keeps saying invalid node structure and then invalid record count under it ex
Invalid node structure
(4, 784)
Invalid record count (several times with different numbers)
(4, 1129)

what do i do i really need help

i forgot to mention my laptop is the 2006 13 in macbook

[aleruiz108]

I am having the same problem and i tried command-s but all i see are lines of stuff and i never got a prompt, i still am going to try the other solutions but i wanted to know any possible causes.. Anybody know why it could be doing this?

Macbook pro 15" 4gb ram 500gb hdd

[aleruiz108]

I decided to turn it off while it was doing whatever command-s does when you start up.. Now i dont even see the apple logo or the gear just a white screen.. Do i have to take it to be repaired?

[eloh]

Try restarting in Safe Mode

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1455


So I am having this same problem. I was able to boot up in Safe mode. Now what should I do to prevent my self from having this issue again.

Issue meaning, when I reboot my Mac, it dosent just sit there forever with the progress circle and the Apple Logo.

[Secruoser]

Same problem here with my iMac. I tried everything suggested here and even Safe mode. It won't start. Verbose mode stops running at these 3 lines:

launchctl: Dubious permissions on file (skipping): /Library/LaunchDaemons
launchctl: Dubious permissions on file (skipping): /System/Library/LaunchDaemons
launchctl: Dubious permissions on file (skipping): /etc/mach_init.d

That's it. Can anyone help? Thanks.

EDIT: OK I kinda fixed it. I booted up with my install CD and went to Disk Utilities and did the Repair Permissions. It took like 10 minutes to fix what looks like A LOT of permission thingy and when I rebooted I can login again.