Black MacBook Hangs at Starting up Mac OS X

[weez999]

I have a macbook from someone who needs me to get it to boot. I don't know the year of the machine but the specs are:

2.0ghz, 1GB RAM, 80GB HD OSX 10.4

I have reset the PRAM and the SMC. I ran the fsck command as well. I am a DOS/Windows tech who just moved into Mac about two years ago so I don't know all of the unix/linux commands yet. Only what I read on Google.

The user does not remember the last time they got any system updates and does not recall if they installed any other software updates just prior to the crash because she leaves it running all the time and just decided to reboot one day and this is what happened. We are dealing with a typical end user who does not pay attention to detail so I am working blind on this one.

I don't have access to a Mac installer disk yet but wanted to see if you guys had any suggestions.

Basically, it boots with the chime, looks good and gets to the blue background screen and gets to the window where it just shows the progress bar finish loading and under that it simply says Starting up Mac OS X. It sits there forever. Any ideas? I plan to run the diskutility when I get the installer disk but until then, any help would be appreciated.

 

[matthewscott661]

If you have another mac with firewire you can boot it in target disk mode by holding T at boot. This will allow you to use the computer as an external HD. Then you can plug it into the macbook and boot holding option. A screen should come up asking you to choose which HD to boot from, and you can see if the macbook will boot from the other HD.
If it does start up ok, then you know you need to reinstall the OS on the macbook.

 

[iLog.Genius]

Boot into safe mode by pressing and holding down the left SHIFT key. Keep holding it down until you get to the blue screen. Hopefully it will boot up normally. Let us know if that works. If not, you're probably looking at a reinstall.