This story begins with my macbook becoming entirely unresponsive while just sitting around with the desktop in focus. My current problems begin with the third of such freezing events. It felt like the hard drive had stopped responding since everything looked fine and I could move my mouse, but as soon as I attempted to access anything that depended upon the file system (ie everything not already in memory) that thing I attempted to access would freeze up as well. The only thing I can do when these happen is to force a shutdown.
The three times I have had these problems I would be greeted with the flashing folder-and-question-mark. So, for the third time now I threw in a live CD I have and ran DiskWarrior and DiskUtility and fsck and everything I could possibly need to recover the system. Each of these programs ran through their routines and reported that it had either successfully made repairs or the disk needed no repairs and was A-OK!. S.M.A.R.T. reports that the drive is perfectly fine as well.
Now, though, whenever I try to start up my computer I'm greeted with the normal grey apple startup image, the folder with the question mark, and also the prohibited sign (grey circle with a slash through it). This is the first time that running the disk repair programs has failed. Expecting a crashed hard drive or something equally fun I threw in the live CD again and attempted to recover my data. The thing is, I was able to navigate the file system perfectly with terminal and didn't even need any data recovery tools. So, at least my data has been safely backed up.
I've tried booting into single user mode, but it seems that DiskWarrior helped my computer in an assisted suicide of sorts as boot.efi is sitting in a DiskWarrior recovered folder and the mach kernel has been entirely misplaced. Immediately I restart, throw in the first Macbook Pro installation CD, and hold down C in an attempt to reinstall the system.
Here is my current problem: Whenever I attempt to boot from any of the installation CDs that came with my laptop, the laptop will begin to boot from the CD and show a grey screen as it begins reading from the disk, but before the spinning gear or grey apple appears the laptop simply restarts and attempts to boot from the disk again.
This boot-restart process loops infinitely with every Apple-provided installation CD I have tried. The laptop never progresses past a grey screen, instead restarting and happily chiming. However, I have been able to boot from a non-Apple Live CD that I own every time I have tried; moreover, the hard drive is perfectly accessible and shows no errors from any program I run. When I hold option upon startup it shows the drive and lets me boot into it (but then the problems I have described pop up). I have also tried resetting PRAM and NVRAM with no success.
Does anyone have any suggestions for how to boot into the installation CD?
The three times I have had these problems I would be greeted with the flashing folder-and-question-mark. So, for the third time now I threw in a live CD I have and ran DiskWarrior and DiskUtility and fsck and everything I could possibly need to recover the system. Each of these programs ran through their routines and reported that it had either successfully made repairs or the disk needed no repairs and was A-OK!. S.M.A.R.T. reports that the drive is perfectly fine as well.
Now, though, whenever I try to start up my computer I'm greeted with the normal grey apple startup image, the folder with the question mark, and also the prohibited sign (grey circle with a slash through it). This is the first time that running the disk repair programs has failed. Expecting a crashed hard drive or something equally fun I threw in the live CD again and attempted to recover my data. The thing is, I was able to navigate the file system perfectly with terminal and didn't even need any data recovery tools. So, at least my data has been safely backed up.
I've tried booting into single user mode, but it seems that DiskWarrior helped my computer in an assisted suicide of sorts as boot.efi is sitting in a DiskWarrior recovered folder and the mach kernel has been entirely misplaced. Immediately I restart, throw in the first Macbook Pro installation CD, and hold down C in an attempt to reinstall the system.
Here is my current problem: Whenever I attempt to boot from any of the installation CDs that came with my laptop, the laptop will begin to boot from the CD and show a grey screen as it begins reading from the disk, but before the spinning gear or grey apple appears the laptop simply restarts and attempts to boot from the disk again.
This boot-restart process loops infinitely with every Apple-provided installation CD I have tried. The laptop never progresses past a grey screen, instead restarting and happily chiming. However, I have been able to boot from a non-Apple Live CD that I own every time I have tried; moreover, the hard drive is perfectly accessible and shows no errors from any program I run. When I hold option upon startup it shows the drive and lets me boot into it (but then the problems I have described pop up). I have also tried resetting PRAM and NVRAM with no success.
Does anyone have any suggestions for how to boot into the installation CD?