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MacBook won't boot, stuck on Apple logo.
- Thread starter mattcam
- Start date
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Do you have any devices plugged in, such as an external drive or an iPod? If so, remove them and try again.
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
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
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
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
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
David
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.
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.
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....
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
David
Try booting using verbose mode as leodavinci0 suggests. Hopefully a message will help you diagnose better.
i've 2gb of ram and its the standard 160gb drive. i tried Southernboy's fix but to no avail.
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...
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 for more information.
David
David
Your right, I totally forgot there's no more FW ports on the new Unibody MacBook. That's a big sigh...
David
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.
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?
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