restart loop

[SiaChris]

I have a 2006 white macbook 2.14 duocore if I remember correctly, with Snow Leopard installed. What I was doing was downloading some synths for Garageband and it said I must restart the computer. Upon restart, the gray screen pops up, I hear the sound and then nothing. Even the spinning rainbow-ish disc isn't there spinning. After about 5 minutes of sitting there, it restarts again.

So far, I have put in the install disc: checked permissions and clicked repair disk. It then said Disk is Okay in both cases. In another area of utilities, I could sort of navigate through the C: drive, so I am inclined to believe that it's actually spinning, although I cannot tell if I hear it going over the fan.

I tried to create a disk image so that I might be able to re-install the OS, but I get an error that there is not enough space. The destination drive has 400G+ open on it and the hard drive has a maximum of 120, so I'm not sure what's going on there.

I need to either recover the files on the system, or get it to start up. Any help is greatly appreciated. I'm kind of at a loss where to go next.

 

[SiaChris]

wow.....nearly 600 views and not one person has any idea? Or did I do something wrong?

 

[brop52]

Take out the drive and connect to another computer with a SATA adapter to test it.

Run the Apple Hardware test.

Why can't you install from the install disk? Version too old?

 

[SiaChris]

Well, it looks like I could install from CD and have read that everything else would stay in tact. Is that true? It's Snow Leopard.

 

[brop52]

Yes just don't erase and install and all of your files will be there. It may create an Old Install (something along those lines it's been a while) folder for some extraneous files.