[HELP] White Screen of Death!!

[kanon14]

Hi guys I've bought a Macbook Air recently so I passed my black C2D Macbook to my girlfriend. SHe has been using it for a few days and it was fine until this morning. She called and told me that the mb won't start and just shows a white screen forever. I instructed her to do a SMC reset but that didn't help. Let me tell you what has been done to the Macbook in these few days.

1) I created a new account for her.
2) I tried to make an image of my account but it kinda hanged midway so I force quit it and just deleted my account (done 5 days ago).
3) She installed some HP printer drivers on OSX and a Ricoh printer driver in XP under bootcamp (Bootcamp was setup long before I passed her the mb)
4) some IT guy at her school created a new account to play with and deleted the account right away.
5) Left the mb at school locked over the weekend.

That's it. That was what has been done to the Macbook over the week and now it got a white screen of death. Does anyone have any idea on why it is failing? Because I haven't seen the mb personally I asked her to bring it back tonight) so I can't exactly describe how it is failing but I plan to format the drive and reinstall OSX if all fail, which comes to my next question.

Because the install disc that comes with the mb is a Tiger, not Leopard, and I got the $50 upgrade disc to upgrade to Leopard, if I want to install Leopard back do I needa install Tiger (using the install disc) first and then install Leopard? My Macbook Air comes with an install disc of Leopard, is it possible if I use that disc to reinstall OSX on my Macbook?

[Wilson1984]

Originally Posted by kanon14

Because the install disc that comes with the mb is a Tiger, not Leopard, and I got the $50 upgrade disc to upgrade to Leopard, if I want to install Leopard back do I needa install Tiger (using the install disc) first and then install Leopard? My Macbook Air comes with an install disc of Leopard, is it possible if I use that disc to reinstall OSX on my Macbook?

Yep. You'll need to do tiger, the upgrade disk didn't come with iLife, just the OS.
Nope, the MBA discs will not work, they are for that hardware.

Rent a couple movies and enjoy some quality time with your gf.

[kanon14]

Originally Posted by Wilson1984

Yep. You'll need to do tiger, the upgrade disk didn't come with iLife, just the OS.
Nope, the MBA discs will not work, they are for that hardware.

Rent a couple movies and enjoy some quality time with your gf.

lol I'll see if I can get the Macbook to boot with the cd first though because Ive read many who can't even do that.

[iCeFuSiOn]

You can use your Leopard upgrade disc to install without the need to re-install Tiger first, it should pick it up fine.

As for iLife, just put in the first Tiger disc and open "Install Bundled Software Only" and select what you want, you'll need disc 2 as well.

[kanon14]

Thx for clearing up. That'll save lots of time

[kanon14]

I just got more info from my gf. She said the IT guy was trying to get the printer driver working and right before he shut down the machine, some applications hanged and the Macbook was acting funny. He tried to force quit but failed so he just shut down the machine (he thought maybe because the machine was getting too hot) and left it there.

I just asked her to do a PRAM/NVRAM reset (cmd+opt+p+m). The machine now gets the chim sound while booting (there was no sound before doing the PRAM reset). but it still stuck at the white screen.

Any thought?

[durija]

Have you tried starting it up in safe boot? (hold down the shift key)?

[kanon14]

Originally Posted by durija

Have you tried starting it up in safe boot? (hold down the shift key)?

I tried holding down the shift key but nothing happened. The only time the Macbook responded was when I hold down the option key (I have bootcamp installed). The cursor appeared but it didn't show any drive.

[medaveda]

My macbook has the exact problem you describe:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread....28924&tstart=0

I sent it to apple care as mine was under warranty but they saw a chip on my laptop (near the keyboard next to the IR sensor) and contend that it was dropped, whereas the chip actually happened like 5 months ago So, I need to pay for the replacement LCD and apple gave me a quote of 755$, which is more than 75% through to a new laptop!!!

Did you happen to solve the problem ? I am contemplating buying a replacement LCD from ebay and replacing it myself !

[applefan69]

Originally Posted by kanon14

I tried holding down the shift key but nothing happened. The only time the Macbook responded was when I hold down the option key (I have bootcamp installed). The cursor appeared but it didn't show any drive.

From sounds of that it sounds like the macbook simply can't find any drives to boot from. It cant even find your windows partition. this could be bad... almost as bad as a harddrive failure.

IF you can boot into single-user mode. (hold S during start-up)

from there do file system check, by typing in

fsck -fy

and pressing enter. Im PRETTY sure that is the right command, I havnt had to do a file system check ion a while so theres a chance i forgot the command but im sure thats right, but if you wanna be extra super careful, i'd wait for another member to either confirm that im right or correct me.

If this dont work then im pretty suire a re-install is your only option.