Macbook won't boot up

[kcwyckoff]

I acidentally dropped my macbook today (only about an inch...), it continued working for a minute but then froze. i forced it to shut down and then tried to restart, but it sat in the grey screen with the 'loading circle' spinning, restarting the loop every 5 or so minutes. i tried to reset the PRAM, but all that did was make the start up sound come back. Another strange thing is that when the screen is up, the power light is off, but when i shut the screen, the power light goes on (it doesn't sleep, it just stays on the grey screen). this is really irritating as i love my laptop dearly, someone please help

 

[deadpixels]

maybe the hard drive got damaged, have you tried to start it up using your install DVD ?

 

[kcwyckoff]

yeah well, i kinda don't have one of those... that's part of the problem. i'm working on finding one though

 

[djinn]

If you find or get DISC1 of the OS X install that came with your laptop you can boot off the cd and go into Apple Hardware Test. You can do this by turning on the computer and holding the letter "D" before the gray screen appears.

 

[deadpixels]

if you don't have the install DVD, you next best bet would be an external hard drive with a version of MacOS already installed i guess.

 

[kcwyckoff]

i found the DVD and ran the hardware test and everything was fine, now i'm trying to reinstall OSX off the DVD, hopefully it recovers all my stuff... i cant lose all that

 

[deadpixels]

i found the DVD and ran the hardware test and everything was fine, now i'm trying to reinstall OSX off the DVD, hopefully it recovers all my stuff... i cant lose all that

good luck, then.

 

[kcwyckoff]

well... it didnt work
then i ran disc utility off the DVD and it said that the block count for SystemEntropyCache was incorrrect and that it should have been 0 instead of 1. WTF is this? the fact that i can't find anything on it on the internet scares me...

 

[deadpixels]

What do you mean didn't work, to repair your HD using disk utility or to re-install MacOS?

 

[kcwyckoff]

both, the osx reinstall didnt work because there was a drive error, and the disc utility couldn't verify or repair the drive because of the reason i stated earlier

 

[deadpixels]

i guess it's bad news, the HD is probably failing or dead. your best bet would be to put a new HD in your laptop, install OsX. put the old one in an external enclosure and try to salvage what you can from it.

 

[kcwyckoff]

well **** me sideways