Here's the situation:
Sunday night, I was watching a movie on my MacBook. All of the sudden the screen froze and forced me to do a hard power down. Upon waiting a minute or 2, I tried to power back up and was greeted with the familiar chime and white screen but no Apple logo. It stayed white (I did this 2 more times). I did some searching on my phone and diagnosed this as a harddrive problem. I booted up from the install disk and ran disk utility to no avail. Repair was not able to fix the problem.
I went out the next day and picked up a Seagate 500 GB internal drive and swapped it in with the old one. Did a fresh install of 10.4 and everything was working. All software updates were then downloaded and installed. I put it to sleep overnight and upon waking it up, the screen froze again forcing a hard power down. I tried booting up again but this time got the blinking "?" instead of the apple logo. I found out that means the computer doesn't know which disk to boot up from. I had a WD external drive plugged in to one of the USB ports. I unplugged the drive and booted up again and everything worked fine.
I went into system preferences and set the Mac HD as the bootup disk. I then put the computer to sleep and went to class. Upon returning and awaking the computer, it froze again (I've learned this is a common problem). When I tried to boot up again (this time with no external devices connected) I was greeted with the blinking "?" again. I was forced to boot up to the install disk, again select the Mac HD as the bootup disk, and restart. It booted up fine then.
It seems that my MacBook for some reason is not remembering the startup disk. Any suggestions?
Sunday night, I was watching a movie on my MacBook. All of the sudden the screen froze and forced me to do a hard power down. Upon waiting a minute or 2, I tried to power back up and was greeted with the familiar chime and white screen but no Apple logo. It stayed white (I did this 2 more times). I did some searching on my phone and diagnosed this as a harddrive problem. I booted up from the install disk and ran disk utility to no avail. Repair was not able to fix the problem.
I went out the next day and picked up a Seagate 500 GB internal drive and swapped it in with the old one. Did a fresh install of 10.4 and everything was working. All software updates were then downloaded and installed. I put it to sleep overnight and upon waking it up, the screen froze again forcing a hard power down. I tried booting up again but this time got the blinking "?" instead of the apple logo. I found out that means the computer doesn't know which disk to boot up from. I had a WD external drive plugged in to one of the USB ports. I unplugged the drive and booted up again and everything worked fine.
I went into system preferences and set the Mac HD as the bootup disk. I then put the computer to sleep and went to class. Upon returning and awaking the computer, it froze again (I've learned this is a common problem). When I tried to boot up again (this time with no external devices connected) I was greeted with the blinking "?" again. I was forced to boot up to the install disk, again select the Mac HD as the bootup disk, and restart. It booted up fine then.
It seems that my MacBook for some reason is not remembering the startup disk. Any suggestions?