Macbook Pro will not boot

[grahamnp]

I posted yesterday with a small problem and now I've got a much bigger problem.

My MacBook Pro will not go past the grey screen and the spinning wheel logo. I tried resetting the PRAM...nothing, reset the power management unit...nothing. I tried booting from the Leopard DVD but it won't let me. It just goes on to get stuck on the grey screen. I did hold down C and if I press the option key it gives me the option to boot from the DVD but I still get stuck on the grey screen after that. Pretty much nothing I do will let me get past the grey screen. I've tried single-user and verbose mode too.

My problems started when I was using Leopard normally except that my Time Machine backup would carry on without making any progress. I tried logging off to "reset" it and the MBP just froze on the blue screen after logout. I held down the power button to do a reboot and all of the above happened.

I haven't changed any settings around or done anything unusual so I'm puzzled as to how this happened.

It will let me boot into my bootcamp partition and that works just fine.

Help please!

 

[vouder17]

Ok try this to see if it works. Switch off your MBP, take out the battery from the back, let it chill for about 5 mins. Put the battery back in and see if it then works.

If that doesn't work try to run fsck-y. Interesting Info

Good luck

 

[grahamnp]

Thanks vouder17 but I tried both and neither worked. When running fsck, I got tens of thousands of error messages before it told me the partition was modified and everything was OK. Is that normal or is that indicative of a problem?

 

[AndyClarke]

I had the same problem. I could also boot into Boot camp. Anything else I got the spinning wheel. However I could boot into the Leopard DVD and I used time machine to backup. All has been fine since and that was four months ago.

 

[grahamnp]

Thanks AndyClarke, I've actually just rebooted after a restore from Timemachine and everything is working great! What an awesome feature!