10.6 Won't Boot - Spinning Wheel of Death

[TheNoel]

I'm currently using Win 7 on my partitioned drive since I can't get OS X to boot.

Here's what I did to screw everything up:

Installed SL awhile back without performing what people here are referring to as a "clean install" (I had lots of third party apps installed).

Things seemed to be working fine, though Finder seemed to lag more in 10.6 than it did in 10.5.

Today, however, I tried updating Parallels 4.0. It required that I reboot in order to finish the installation. But, when the Apple logo appeared, that damned spinner just wouldn't stop.

[Perhaps Parallels is "tainting" the kernel?]

I've tried a number of things to fix the problem.

First, I tried reinstalling from the SL Install DVD. No luck there.

I tried downgrading to 10.5 (archive and install). Still didn't boot.

I even tried several volume repairs. Those didn't help either.


So, now I've heard that some users are having luck booting in safe mode.
But, if I try that, will I be able to transfer data to a backup drive?


Any suggestions?

 

[celticpride678]

Well, if you have tried clean installs of the OS', it sound like a hardware problem to me. Maybe the hard drive is beginning to fail? Have you upgraded anything (hardware wise) in the past few weeks/months.

 

[TheNoel]

I somewhat doubt it's a hardware problem.

I'm able to boot Win 7, after all.

Also, I *didn't* perform a clean install.

 

[MWPULSE]

Have you tried repairing permissions, i think the best bet is to get another mac, and use TDM to transfer stuff off the drive.. I thought there were W7/Vista programs that were able to read a mac partition??

or is that just me not remembering things correctly?

Happy Hunting

PTP

 

[iLog.Genius]

You're looking at doing a Erase and Install. It's unlikely that it's hardware as you are able to boot to Windows 7. Perhaps a corrupted file is not allowing you to fully boot. If you are worried about data, you should be able to retrieve your data from Windows.

 

[borcanm]

Is there anyway you could instal Rosetta from the SL disk on your SL partition. If not then boot into safe mode.

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

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1564?viewlocale=en_US

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1411?viewlocale=en_US

Those links should help.

PS It's definitely NOT a hardware problem.

 

[jmpage2]

Have you tried booting in safe mode? Try booting up and holding the shift key, should start it without the 3rd party crap clobbering things.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1455?viewlocale=en_US