Macbook repeatedly rebooting

[Land Sea-Lion]

My Macbook won't boot up all the way. It plays the start-up noise, shows the Apple logo and the spinning loading wheel, and then shuts down and instantly restarts the boot-up process. It cycles through this over and over. From my research, this is kernal panic?

I have tried holding command s to type in fsck -fy, but it won't let me type anything. The words show up, I hit the keys, but nothing happens and then it just reboots again.

I tried holding command+option+p+r but that didn't solve the problem, either. Neither did holding shift.

I tried inserting the original os x panther disc 1 that came with the Macbook (mid 2007 model) and holding command+c to boot from the disc, but that also didn't work. Could this be because I upgraded to leopard a while back? Is it not possible to downgrade? I can't find my leopard disc!

So, what are my options? Should it be possible to do a fresh install with my panther discs? Am I going to have to spend $170 rebuying leopard? Would that even work? Right now I'm posting from my Windows XP Bootcamp partition.

I just spent $90 on yet another magsafe adapter for this 4 year old computer. Getting frustrated...

 

[session101]

so 2 things... number one your HD, how old is it? and it might be effffed

so here's what you can do:

1) cheap way: take the HD out of your macbook and buy an external case that will fit the drive and plug it into another computer and format that sucker and then replace back into your macbook and start over

2) buy a new HD and start over and hope that solves your problem.

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It could be your RAM just by far shot, if you have 2 sticks, remove one then boot up, still the same problem...then switch to the other stick, make sure to use the other RAM slot when switching, you might have a bad RAM slot too

 

[ataboc]

sounds like a hard drive to me.

 

[killerrobot]

I tried holding command+option+p+r but that didn't solve the problem, either. Neither did holding shift.

Did anything happen at all? Try holding down option and see what happens.

I tried inserting the original os x panther disc 1 that came with the Macbook (mid 2007 model) and holding command+c to boot from the disc, but that also didn't work. Could this be because I upgraded to leopard a while back? Is it not possible to downgrade? I can't find my leopard disc!

A mid 2007 mb should never even have seen a panther disk. Tiger was out in 2006. So that's why it's not reading that disk.

Try resetting the SMC and also try holding down option at start and see if anything pops up on the screen.

 

[Land Sea-Lion]

so 2 things... number one your HD, how old is it? and it might be effffed

so here's what you can do:

1) cheap way: take the HD out of your macbook and buy an external case that will fit the drive and plug it into another computer and format that sucker and then replace back into your macbook and start over

2) buy a new HD and start over and hope that solves your problem.

______________________________________________________________

It could be your RAM just by far shot, if you have 2 sticks, remove one then boot up, still the same problem...then switch to the other stick, make sure to use the other RAM slot when switching, you might have a bad RAM slot too

The HD is 4 years old I will look into those things.

Did anything happen at all? Try holding down option and see what happens.

A mid 2007 mb should never even have seen a panther disk. Tiger was out in 2006. So that's why it's not reading that disk.

Try resetting the SMC and also try holding down option at start and see if anything pops up on the screen.

Oh, whoops, those must be the discs for my old Mac Mini or something. Can't keep my cats in order. I can't find my Tiger or Leopard discs, though, so that makes this even more difficult.

When did the option+command+p+r thing I read to hold it until I counted three chimes, which I did, but it didn't solve the boot-up problem.

When I hold down option at boot I get to choose between Macintosh HD and Windows XP. Windows boots normally and seems to work fine, but Macintosh HD does not.

I tried resetting the SMC and it didn't seem to do anything.

 

[killerrobot]

When I hold down option at boot I get to choose between Macintosh HD and Windows XP. Windows boots normally and seems to work fine, but Macintosh HD does not.

That's good news it will boot into Windows. Do you have another mac around? You can try booting the mb in Target mode (http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1661) and repairing permissions etc. once you have done that.

 

[Land Sea-Lion]

That's good news it will boot into Windows. Do you have another mac around? You can try booting the mb in Target mode (http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1661) and repairing permissions etc. once you have done that.

I just connected the macbook to a mac mini and everything seemed to go fine, but I can't actually access any of the files. The firewire logo is bouncing around the macbook screen and both Macintosh HD and Windows XP show up on the mini, but when I click on them it's like looking in an empty folder. Highlighting them and pressing command+i still shows all the usual information, though (Capacity, Used, etc.) and I still have the same amount of data that I remember being there.

EDIT: Just started up Disc Utility and tried to repair the disc but it says the repair failed.

 

[killerrobot]

Hmm... odd that the repair failed. There must be a bad sector on the disk somewhere.

Do you have a back up on an external that you could restore to?

 

[Land Sea-Lion]

Hmm... odd that the repair failed. There must be a bad sector on the disk somewhere.

Do you have a back up on an external that you could restore to?

I have an external hd with Time Machine set up. Is there a way to wipe the disk without re-installing the OS? I still can't find any of my repair discs.

EDIT: Hmm, now Macintosh HD no longer shows up when entering target disc mode. Only Windows XP does.