Leopard won't boot, stuck on wite apple with spinng whell

[sircharlo]

Ahhh !

My macbook won't boot, it stays stuck at the White screen with the Apple logo ant the spinning wheel.

Booting into verbose mode gives these lines as the last:

SMC::smcIH no fPlatformPlugin, cannot set plimits
GFX0: family matching fails
Override HT40 CTL Powers. EEPROM Version is 14.4, Device Type 5
mac 12.10 phy 8.1 radio 12.0
AirPort_Athr5424ab: Ethernet address xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
AirPort: Link down on en1
IOBluetoothBNEDriver: Ethernet address xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
dlil_output: output error retval = 1

After this it completely stops moving.

Please help, I need my mac on Saturday !

And I don't have the Leopard installation disc with me.. yet.

And to top it off, I can't boot into safe mode !

 

[JediMeister]

Few questions: What was the last thing you recall doing when the computer was working? Downloaded something, an update perhaps? Ran a process/application? If you can't safe boot, we can't do much of anything until you have the restore disc on hand so we can use disk utility to try to diagnose/fix the issue. Also as another thought, disconnect everything from the computer other than the mouse/keyboard, they can sometimes interrupt or hang the boot process.

 

[sircharlo]

Nah, nothing was connected, just power.

Actually, I was running a program in Darwine (which i have done a million times) and wanted to open up a Terminal window to tweak something in X11. I got this weird error message in Terminal saying my administrator (Me !) had changed my permissions for the shell and that i couldn't run Terminal, or something like that. I don't remember exactly. I googled the message on my then-still-working Mac and saw someone who said that rebooting had fixed the problem. I rebooted, and Presto ! Macbook won't boot.

I managed to find some Leopard installation CDs, I'll try an Archive and Install, it should fix my problem. I'll post back for news.

 

[sircharlo]

Damn it. Nothing works. I borrowed a friend's Leopard DVD, but of course it didn't work. (Please don't lecture me).

I start up my computer, and depending on who knows what, i either get the eternal pale gray screen with the apple and the spinning wheel, or a blue screen with a cursor that disappears after two seconds,then a darker blue screen with a dark blue spinning wheel, and the cursor again... an infuriating loop.

Would Archive and Install work with any Leopard retail DVD to reinstall my (already Leopard 10.5.6 but scrapped) system on my Macbook ?

 

[sircharlo]

Okay, I got my hands on a retail Leopard DVD.

Oh yeah ! I'm watching the progress bar right now: "Installing Mac OS X on the volume "Macintosh HD"" !

Hope it works.

Time Remaining: About 2 hours and 7 minutes !!! Oh well, I'm not complaining

 

[foidulus]

Okay, I got my hands on a retail Leopard DVD.

Oh yeah ! I'm watching the progress bar right now: "Installing Mac OS X on the volume "Macintosh HD"" !

Hope it works.

Time Remaining: About 2 hours and 7 minutes !!! Oh well, I'm not complaining

Just out of curiosity, did you try anything before attempting to reinstall? After you pop the Leopard disk in, you can launch terminal and Disk Utility. You may have been able to repair disk permissions and see if that fixed your issue.

 

[sircharlo]

Yeah, nothing worked. I have a sneaking suspicion it had to do with KeyRemap4Macbook, but I can't be sure... However, the last lines in verbose mode had to do with KR4M. Anyway, the archive and install fixed everything and left me exactly where i was before the crash

And I did reinstall KR4M, without problems, except for a weird black screen with some lines of code that occurred before a reboot a couple of times, but now it's gone.

 

[izzo]

hmm, thats what my mac did when my hard drive went bad and I had to replace it.

 

[sircharlo]

Disk Utility didn't find anything...