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Help me quick... Macbook Won't Boot - Fresh Install

agentphish

agentphish

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Sep 7, 2004
1,140
0
I have my cousins macbook. I have about 24 hours to get it fixed before I go home 2 hours away.

A little background. It's 2 years old. Has 2 gigs of ram. Not sure what speed the machine is. I think its 2.0ghz Core Duo. It was on 10.4.11.

She told me it would just randomly pinwheel all the time and that she was having a lot of difficulty getting apps to launch properly. I figured ehh, it's been hangin around for 2 years, maybe it just needs a good format and fresh install of everything.

So I put my Leopard Disk in. Did a format and install of the OS from the disk. Computer would not boot to the OS. Just sits at gray apple screen with the little spinning wheel thing like it's trying to boot.

I decided well maybe something didn't work out well with the install, so i rebooted to the disk, went into disk util., manually formatted the HDD, then did another fresh install.

Still no luck. I'm really stuck. Have no ideas and not many resources where I'm at, as I forgot my DriveGenius disk at home. I did bring my Tiger disk too so maybe ill try that, but i really wanted to put Leopard on her machine. Please give me some ideas!

Thanks!
 
Interesting here...It will not boot to my Tiger disk.

I've been holding the C key to get it to boot and no dice.
 
Ok...I've never had a mac act like this.

I reset the PRAM for ***** and giggles... Now the damn thing won't even turn on!

EDIT: OK I plugged in the magsafe and I was able to boot to the Leopard install disc. Still won't boot to the hard disc. WTF!

No one has suggestions?
 
It seems very strange that you can get all the way through a leopard install and then it won't boot. Makes me think you have something wrong with the way the drive is setup.

When you formatted the drive, did you make sure to partition the drive with the GUID partition format? Intel Mac's need this format in order to boot.

I would format the drive again, and make sure you partition it as GUID, not Apple Partition Map. Then install Leopard again...
 
Yes, it is set up from GUID from the get go. I thought to check that after it wouldn't boot. It was pretty strange.

My Tiger disk still won't load.
I let it run a 7 pass 0 out of the hard drive over night. I have now started to try a Leopard install again this morning. We'll see what happens.

EDIT: Ok, so it once again completed the install of Leopard. It's just sitting at the gray screen with the apple and the spinning thing, just like it did before. The superdrive seems to kick on and off every once in a while.
 
agentphish said:
Yes, it is set up from GUID from the get go. I thought to check that after it wouldn't boot. It was pretty strange.

My Tiger disk still won't load.
I let it run a 7 pass 0 out of the hard drive over night. I have now started to try a Leopard install again this morning. We'll see what happens.

EDIT: Ok, so it once again completed the install of Leopard. It's just sitting at the gray screen with the apple and the spinning thing, just like it did before. The superdrive seems to kick on and off every once in a while.
Click to expand...

1. How long are your waiting on the grey screen? Sometimes after a fresh install, the system has to build certain cache files.

2. Have you tried holding the option key down at startup until you get to the boot loader screen which shows all bootable volumes? The Tiger DVD or Leopard DVD should show up there. If your hard disk is bootable, it should show up there as well.

3. Have your tried running the Apple Hardware Test? You will need the original DVD that came with the mac and repeat step 2 above.
 
Well at this point it seems to be the hard drive IMO. I held my ear to the computer where the hard disk is, and I can hear the drive making the same repetitive noise over and over again after about 30 seconds of booting. It doesn't sound like a normal hard disk noise, though it's not a loud click characteristic of when a hard disk dies, it is suspicious none the less.

To answer the previous questions:
1. I have waited approximately 40 minutes at the booting screen. I've installed Leopard on my 3 machines at home, and 2 others, all of which are older than this Macbook, and they took no longer than 3-6 minutes TOPS to boot up after a fresh install.

2. I have held the option key down, and tried to select my boot drive. No dice.

3. She can't find her original DVD's. I hate that she loses EVERYTHING when people tell her to keep things in a safe place.
 
agentphish said:
Well at this point it seems to be the hard drive IMO. I held my ear to the computer where the hard disk is, and I can hear the drive making the same repetitive noise over and over again after about 30 seconds of booting. It doesn't sound like a normal hard disk noise, though it's not a loud click characteristic of when a hard disk dies, it is suspicious none the less.

To answer the previous questions:
1. I have waited approximately 40 minutes at the booting screen. I've installed Leopard on my 3 machines at home, and 2 others, all of which are older than this Macbook, and they took no longer than 3-6 minutes TOPS to boot up after a fresh install.

2. I have held the option key down, and tried to select my boot drive. No dice.

3. She can't find her original DVD's. I hate that she loses EVERYTHING when people tell her to keep things in a safe place.
Click to expand...

Can you boot into Single User mode (cmd-s)? If not, your hard drive is failing.

If you can, run the following command followed by the return key:

/sbin/fsck -fy

If you see errors, repeat the command (up to 6 times) until you get a clean output. If you are still seeing fsck errors, your hard drive is failing.
 
In regards to booting form the Tiger disk, I don't think Tiger disks will boot Intel machines. I know that seems hard to believe, but I swear I saw this somewhere. Something about the fact that the tiger retail disks came out before the Intel machines were released?

Still don't know why you can't boot from your fresh leopard install. Do you have an external disk you can try? You should be able to install leopard on an external drive and boot from that (Firewire or USB).
 
aross99 said:
In regards to booting form the Tiger disk, I don't think Tiger disks will boot Intel machines. I know that seems hard to believe, but I swear I saw this somewhere. Something about the fact that the tiger retail disks came out before the Intel machines were released?

Still don't know why you can't boot from your fresh leopard install. Do you have an external disk you can try? You should be able to install leopard on an external drive and boot from that (Firewire or USB).
Click to expand...

Yes you are right. He needs the original Tiger discs that came with the computer. The retail copy of Tiger is for PowerPC's only.
 
hard to believe it is a hard drive issue, if you can get all the way through a leopard install without any errors. If you get to the grey apple screen, then it is running bootx and is loading the kernel. I would try booting in verbose mode by holding down CMD-v as suggested above?
 
Yeah, well I'm pretty damn sure it'd the hard disk. I can boot into single user mode, and have tried the FSCK, but only once, I will try it a few times and see what happens, but as I said before, if I put my ear to the machine where the HDD is I just hear the same noise over and over and over again, like its trying to read it but it gets stuck. I do agree this is pretty strange considering I can complete a Leopard installation with seemingly no issues.

I want to get my hands on the appropriate apple service diagnostic for this machine, just to see if there could possibly be anything else wrong with it, but I don't know where to find it. I have a few different versions a friend gave me, but none work on this Macbook 1,1.

About the tiger disk not booting, that makes perfect sense and after reading that in the thread, I remember reading that before...of course she can't find her original restore disks. She really doesn't take care of her stuff.

You guys should see the outside of this Macbook, its scratched and scuffed to bloody hell in just under 2 full years of use...even after I bought her a very nice Timbuk2 notebook bag. My 4 year old powerbook still looks new sans a few scratches on the bottom...GIRLS!
 
When I boot in single user the last couple of lines say

BSD root: disk0s2, Major 14, minor 2 (what does this mean)
Singleuser boot -- fsck not done
Root Device in mounted read-only (is mounted read-only normal?)

Thanks

EDIT: When I booted to single user mode this time, I ran the FSCK command, and it completed once with no problems, but when I did it a second time the machine shut itself down almost immediately. This confirms the bad drive for sure methinks.
 
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