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Sounds like your Mac is having trouble booting. The first thing to try when this happens is to verify the disk - to do this you'll need a Mac OS X startup disc. Boot the Mac and immediately hold down Option to get to the boot manager. Once it loads up, insert the Mac OS X DVD, press the clockwise arrow button to get it to rescan, then select the Mac OS X DVD and click the right arrow to boot from it. Once that's done, instead of installing Mac OS X, after selecting a language go to the Utilities menu and choose Disk Utility. Select your hard disk and click Verify Disk. If it finds errors, have it attempt repairs by clicking Repair Disk.
 
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