HELP! Macbook wont boot up :(

[grum]

Arghhhhh!

My Macbook (2 Ghz Core2duo - 2 gigs of RAM - 80 gig HD) had started freezing and running very slowly this morning, so I tried switching off (I had to do it by holding down the power button as it was not responding). When I switched back on it would not get past the grey screen and the apple logo with the circular animation thing.

I have tried rebooting several times and it still gets stuck on there. I have also tried resetting the pram, the power management thing, starting in safe mode, reseating the RAM in its slots - no joy with any of them.

Stupidly all my college work and other music projects are on there and I have none of it backed up. I never thought a three month old laptop would fail on me. Does anyone have any suggestions? I spose it is still under warrantly but I no longer have the apple phone support for free and I am loath to pay £35 for them to tell me to try all the things I have already tried or say 'bring it in to the apple store'.

What do i do?

 

[Angrist]

Can you boot off a CD?

Did you try booting into single user mode? (From there run fsck)

From what I remember ... when the gray screen comes up, if it hang BEFORE the little circle shows up it's a hardware issue. If it hangs AFTER the circle shows up, then thats a software issue.

 

[cwedl]

you need to reset the PRAM and this should sort the problem out - click here for instructions

(edit) - sorry you've tried that! Sorry! you could do an archive an install? where's MadJew when you need him!

 

[MacBoyX]

Any chance you have another Mac friend around with a IntelMac? You could at least try booting your machine into Target disk mode (Apple T) and hook it up to another Mac and get your data off.

macboyX

 

[grum]

thanks folks. Managed to boot from the CD and then reinstalled OSX. Thankfully it kept all my settings. Still a bit worrying though. I noticed my HD is nearly full, could this be something to do with it? I bought a 160 gig drive for it just in case (and i have now backed up all my stuff!).

 

[mad jew]

It could be the lack of free hard drive space. How low was it?

 

[grum]

It got down to about 200 mb I think

 

[mad jew]

Yeah, the problems were definitely hard drive space-related then. Try to keep 8GB of free space available at all times on modern operating systems.

 

[grum]

Yeah, the problems were definitely hard drive space-related then. Try to keep 8GB of free space available at all times on modern operating systems.

as much as that eh? Right thanks. Going to put my 160 gig drive in this weekend so hopefully it will take me a while to fill that up anyway.

 

[mad jew]

Ideally, yeah. It needs space for the swap files.