HELP! Latest Quicktime update seemed to kill my MBP (won't boot)

[LoneWolf121188]

I installed iTunes 8 and quicktime and all that on monday when it was released, but I never got around to rebooting my MBP until last night. When I did, it installed the updates just fine while it was shutting down...then when it turned back on, it just switched off a few seconds after the apple logo appeared on the screen. No error or anything, just completely switched off. I tried "safe mode" (holding shift after the gong), which brought up the little spinning "thinking" animation under the apple logo for a few seconds...then it just shut down. I tried PRAM and PMU resets, those had no effect. WTF?

So then I tried booting from my windows partition. Everything works fine. I'm actually typing this on my MBP from Vista right now. So this is clearly a software problem, not a hardware one. Of course, I wasn't using Time Machine, so I don't have that to boot from. I can't find my OS X install CD anywhere, so I can't boot from that (I do have an image of it on my external HDD and I tried installing that to my flash drive, but my flash drive is 50MB too small. Can I delete a few files off of the image to get it to fit on my 8GB flash drive?). I have MacDisk installed in Vista, so I can see my whole OS X partition. Is there anything I can do from Vista to analyze my OS X install?

 

[LoneWolf121188]

Update: with a little trickery, I managed to shrink my OSX Install DVD image to fit onto my flash drive. I booted from it, started Disk Utility, then tried a Verify Disk. Almost immediately I got an "Invalid PEOF" error (there were no numbers after it like with most PEOF errors). It didn't reference any file or anything, which makes it a bit annoying. Any ideas on what to do? fsck from single user mode gave me the same error, again with no reference. Just out of curiosity, I tried to install the OS again from the flash drive, but a yellow triangle was displayed over my Macintosh HDD and the installer said I'd have to format the partition before installing the OS. I'd definetly like to avoid that if at all possible. Anyone know of any utilities that I can put on a flash drive and boot from that will check my disk for errors and fix them?

 

[DaveTheGrey]

Hi LoneWolf,

why haven't you burned the OS X image to a double layer dvd-r? That would've done the trick. But it seems, that you have already made it with your flashdrive.
First of all I want to say that I don't have a solution for your problem, only some suggestions.

- There is a app called diskwarrior and like they say on their homepage "When you buy DiskWarrior, you will receive the DiskWarrior 4 CD. This Mac OS X bootable CD". This could help you.

- If you can access your files over vista or if you got a second mac and you boot into firewire mode (hold t on startup) you can backup your files to an external hd, format your os x partition and reinstall os x. If you don't have an external, I would strongly recommend you to buy one after solving your problem you can use it as a time machine backup drive!

- It could be possible, that your internal hd is dying. Just because Vista is running doesn't prove that it can't be a hardware related problem.

I wish you all the best.
Sorry for my english.

Dave

 

[LoneWolf121188]

Fixed! I used Diskwarrior on my friend's computer and did a repair and it worked perfectly!