OMG did my mac die??? i need some help please.

[thumper]

this morning i turned my mac off like normal... but when i got home after work
i turned it on... the grey logo came up then it turned off.... so i turned it back on and the same thing happened... i cannt boot back into osx!!!

i had to boot to my Windows XP partition to write this and its making me really sad. i tryed safe mode... nothing... i tried that /sbin/fsck -fy and is said
volume check failed signal 8

in windows xp when i click on my Mac HD partition it says its corrupted and unreadable...

i really need some help

 

[J the Ninja]

Ok, first of all, calm down. The fact that your Mac can boot into Windows suggests this will be simple fix. Did you try booting OS X in verbose mode? If it got stuck, what did it say?

Unless you have MacDrive installed, Windows will always show your Mac partition as corrupt and unreadable. It doesn't understand HFS+

 

[thumper]

i have mac drive
what is verbose mode, thanks for your help

 

[thumper]

when i held Command + V on start up... i got the black screen that ran thru a bunch of stuff then ended with "CPU halted" then it turned off...

 

[J the Ninja]

i have mac drive
what is verbose mode, thanks for your help

Hold down Command and V keys at startup. OS X and boot.efi will loose the pretty white splash screen and Apple logo at startup, and you be able to see the actual boot messages. Very handy if something isn't going right. (the logo getting stuck doesn't tell you much). If it hangs, write down the last couple things that appeared on the console. That will at least tell you what it was trying to do, if not what is actually wrong.

The likely answer, btw, is that your hard drive is going out, and the Mac partition fell first. Don't be too surprised if the XP one goes screwy soon too. Hopefully though, something just went wrong with OS X, and the disk is fine. At worst, you'll need to do an erase and install, then you'll be back in business.

Heck, while you're troubleshooting from XP, go ahead and download Speedfan (Google it) and see if you get a SMART readout from the drive. It MIGHT help shed some light on this.