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silverlining

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 17, 2009
3
0
Hi everyone,

Having problems with my black Macbook, bought a year ago. Turned it on this morning and can't get past the grey startup screen with the apple and whirring circle. I cna't htink of anything that I did to make this happen, and I have done a disc repair from the disk utility and it says the harddrive is fine.

If anyone has any suggestions, I'd be very happy to hear them! It's always the days NOTHING can go wrong that I seem to get problems....:s
 

chas0001

macrumors 6502a
Sep 18, 2006
804
0
Alicante, SPAIN
Try these:

Shutdown the computer then press the power button while holding down :

CMD OPT P R (to reset PRAM and NVRAM) - after the second bong sound release the keys to allow it to boot normally.

or

The Left Shift Key (to boot into safe mode)

or

CMD V (boot into verbose mode and see if what line the boot process gets stuck on).
 

silverlining

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 17, 2009
3
0
Hi, I tried both of those with no success, have tried the verbose boot and the line it gets stuck on ends in:

Feb 17 (then time), name of my macbook, (com.apple.mDNSReponder) posix_spawnp("/usr/sbin/mDNSResponder", ...): No such file or directory

Does anyone have any idea what this means?

Thanks!
 

chas0001

macrumors 6502a
Sep 18, 2006
804
0
Alicante, SPAIN
Hi, I tried both of those with no success, have tried the verbose boot and the line it gets stuck on ends in:

Feb 17 (then time), name of my macbook, (com.apple.mDNSReponder) posix_spawnp("/usr/sbin/mDNSResponder", ...): No such file or directory

Does anyone have any idea what this means?

Thanks!

Other people have posted on the Apple Support forums regarding this problem. Apparently the problem could be due to file permissions being incorrect in the root partition. I would of course use extreme caution before following the advice. Ensure that you have a backup of your hard drive before proceeding.

See the reply by Steve Palm. http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1243061&tstart=0

If this does not work you may have to do a clean install.

Good Luck.
 

Consultant

macrumors G5
Jun 27, 2007
13,314
34
Other people have posted on the Apple Support forums regarding this problem. Apparently the problem could be due to file permissions being incorrect in the root partition. I would of course use extreme caution before following the advice. Ensure that you have a backup of your hard drive before proceeding.

See the reply by Steve Palm. http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1243061&tstart=0

If this does not work you may have to do a clean install.

Good Luck.

Permission repair could be done with OS dvd.
 

silverlining

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 17, 2009
3
0
Thanks for all the replies... I have a sinking feeling that it might be something to do with permissions. I tried to repair permissions on Disk Utility and it came up with error messages, wouldn't do it.

I tried an archive and install from my OS disc, but that failed too.

I want to back everything up but have no idea how to do this if I can't even get to the desktop!

Feeling very frustrated...
 

chas0001

macrumors 6502a
Sep 18, 2006
804
0
Alicante, SPAIN
Thanks for all the replies... I have a sinking feeling that it might be something to do with permissions. I tried to repair permissions on Disk Utility and it came up with error messages, wouldn't do it.

I tried an archive and install from my OS disc, but that failed too.

I want to back everything up but have no idea how to do this if I can't even get to the desktop!

Feeling very frustrated...

If you have an external USB or Firewire disk you can install OS X on it and then boot from it and use the migration assistant to migrate everything from the Macbooks internal HD (this will both create a bootable installation but will also be a full backup of your data). When the external HD is working fine you can use disk utility to copy everything back to the internal hard drive.

Its a bit of a pain but should resolve the problems.
 
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