Macbook (early 2008) boot problem

[fiskah]

Hi there,

My Macbook (early 2008) froze and then I held down the power button to shut it down.
Now it refuses to boot - it just stands on the greyish boot screen without any Apple logo ever appearing.

I've tried resetting it by removing the battery and power adapter and then holding down the power button for 5 seconds. That didn't help.

After being stuck on the greyish boot screen for a couple of minutes the fan starts blowing quite heavily.

What can I do?

 

[Buskape]

Try booting with the Mac Os X DVD

 

[fiskah]

Try booting with the Mac Os X DVD

Done. Didn't work. It seemed that it had no effect atall. After a couple of minutes it stopped spinning the dvd, but no changes appeared on the screen.

 

[chrismacguy]

You could also try resetting the PRAM, (Command-Option-P-R on boot-up).

Its weird it wont accept the DVD and boot, you might need to take that to Apple.

 

[XmcbrideXprideX]

Safeboot

I would try Safeboot. Holding down the left shift key on boot up. Also you can try booting up to Single User Mode and running FSCK. See where those get you.

 

[UnderLoK]

Ram

I would rs-seat the ram. If that doesn't work then remove one try again, if it still does the same thing swap the two and try again.

 

[karnsculpture]

I've had the same problem and eventually got the machine to boot to the installation DVD. Seems there is a HD problem as Disk Utility does not find the HD. Booted to Hardware Test but oddly that found no problems. I'm going to try installing a new HD (wanted to upgrade anyway). I'm glad I have backups!

 

[fiskah]

I tried calling Apple, and they started resetting the whole thing, safebooting, etc. etc. but ended up asking me to bring them the computer.

Thanks for the help though