Blue Screen Load Issue

[Nebcron]

Hello,

I have a late 2008 MacBook and randomly tonight when I went to start it up I got a constantly repeating blue screen load. I've checked around on the internet for troubleshooting and what I saw instructed me to insert the OSX installation disc and boot from there. One set of instructions asked me to repair the disc, I tried this and got an error. Then I tried an archive and install and this failed as well. I made no updates today and when I shut it down this afternoon it was working properly.

Does anyone have any clue what might be wrong and how to fix it?

 

[BlueRevolution]

What error, exactly?

 

[Nebcron]

Well it is a permissions error. I figured out what happened. A permission got changed on the hard drive where myself and admin are read and write, the everyone else tab was changed to "no access"

Trying to read up on that issue, but I can only boot in from my boot disc. Any clue how I might be able to change the permission through that?

 

[BlueRevolution]

You mean on the hard drive itself? You can open Terminal in the installer and type:

chmod 775 /Volumes/[name of your hard drive]

If your hard drive has spaces in the name, you need to escape them with backslashes, so that "Macintosh HD" becomes Macintosh\ HD.

 

[Nebcron]

OK, well I tried that and typed in: chmod 775 /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD

Terminal dropped down a line, but gave no indication that anything had changed. I restarted and am still getting the blue screen load.

Did I miss something?

 

[BlueRevolution]

Terminal dropped down a line, but gave no indication that anything had changed.

That means it worked. You'd get an error if anything had gone wrong. UNIX tends not to provide confirmation for stuff unless you ask for it.

I restarted and am still getting the blue screen load.

Did I miss something?

Then apparently that's not your problem. Can you repair permissions on the volume from your install disks?

 

[Nebcron]

When I've tried to repair through the disc utility it gives me an error. Do I need to get a backup drive to boot from? Will that work?

 

[BlueRevolution]

Is your drive fully backed up? A fresh install may be the easiest way to recover, since it sounds like something is wonky with your partition.