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JungleMac

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 6, 2008
4
0
--- MacBook Pro (Model 1,2): 17” Intel Core Duo 2.16 GHz (Bought August/September 2006) 2GB RAM. (In March I added the second bank of 1GB RAM to bring the total to 2GB); Mac OS X 10.4.11 ---

The computer was fine all along except, and for no reason whatsoever, suddenly some 18 narrow lines (about 1/2 inch wide) appeared next to the cursor and moved along with the cursor. The lines look like a screen dump as if it was some tiny screen with lines scrolling. Then the screen froze, then the mac froze altogether.

When I try to restart, I get past the grey screen with the circling lines, and the machine freezes on the blue screen (not sure it freezes, but it sits there forever without any feedback of processes running)

I tried to boot from a second partition on the disk and even from an external Firewire disk (all of them Mac OS X 10.4.11), same problem: all of them freeze at the blue screen.

I can’t even re-install the OS: I tried to start from the installation disks that came with the MBP, same symptoms, the machine went past the apple gray screen with the spinning bars but stopped responding when it went into the gray blank screen

I can only boot in safe mode and now the lines are there and move with the cursor but fortunately the machine doesn’t freeze.

I ran diskutility and repaired permissions etc..., repeated the attempts but no luck.

Could this be a RAM problem (but then why it doesn’t cause the Mac to freeze when in Safe Boot)

I don’t have the luxury of sending the computer to a mac expert because where I live there are none within 250 kms

I am at a loss and your urgent help is much appreciated.

Thanks.
 
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