Help! Mac won't boot

My girlfriend's macbook has suddenly stopped booting. It gets as far as the white screen with the counter made of radial lines, and sticks there. We've tried it several times with no joy, even leaving it for an hour - nothing.

Any ideas? Is there some way of me fixing it by connecting it to my macbook in target disk mode?

The only time I came upon this was when I accidentally changed all the file permissions on the drive. It may be best to ask at the InsanelyMac ( http://www.insanelymac.com/ ) forum for an answer to this problem.
I had a backup of all the data that was on my Mac so I just reinstalled Mac OS X and then installed my apps.

If you've got Firewire, then maybe.

Have you tried Safe Mode ?

You learn something new every day.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107393

Indeed!

If you cant boot into Safe Mode, then I think the most expedient way of getting out of trouble is into re-install OSX.

Other possible causes are a dodgy hard drive and/or memory - might as well try re-installing first, and if that doesn't work look into the other problem areas.

Boot from a Mac OS X install disk, launch the Disk Utility from there (it's in the "Utilities" menu) and have it fix both the file permissions and the full volume. Then reboot.

In case you don't know how to open the Mac CD/DVD drive:
Start the Mac, when you hear the bell, hold down the (left) mouse button until the CD drive(s) open(s).
Now insert the OS X installation disk, close the drive and reboot the computer (power down might help with that).
When you hear the bell again, press and hold down the Option/("Alt") key until the boot menu appears.
Choose the OS X disk.


You should also try booting in verbose mode, so you can see where it's stopping:



Disconnecting all unnecessary USB and Firewire devices usually also helps reducing the boot problems. My Mac for example sometimes has a problem with an external USB hub (or one of the many devices that's connected to it); when I disconnect the hub, the Mac always boots.

Thanks for all the help guys. I backed up all her stuff onto mine and tried to repair the disk, and it wouldn't even repair the disk. So I tried to reinstall - and the main volume wouldn't even show up to install onto! So I had to use Disk Utility to erase the disk and then install. Pain in the bum but it's all over now. Thanks again...

!!!!!

I thought macs were magical, mystical machines that never ever have a single problem!

Of course -- they're easy to upgrade as well:

1) Take mac
2) drop in garbage
3) buy a new one

Much easier than all the clowning around with parts like you'd do on a PC.

The only thing really mac about it is the OS, if you would open a Mac you will see loads of other well known brands inside them like Sony, Samsung and so on... You are probably talking about the old stuff running on Mac OS 9 or lower! At that point Mac was good.

I think about Mac not more as some PC parts screwed into a small white or aluminium casing with a large pricetag with MacOSX included and the possibility to install Windows on it.

I would only advice people to use the Mac if the software you like to use only runs under MacOSX.

Apple's main advantage is also it's main disavantage: Their magical reliability is due to their strict control of the hardware and low number of available configurations. there's a handful of different Mac hardware offerings, while a random PC can have any of thousands of different motherboards, video cards, sound cards, network cards, etc. making up billions of varying hardware configurations of varying quality. A large portion of the perceived unreliability of Microsoft Windows is directly related to the quality or combination of hardware.

I've used some Windows systems that are rock-solid, and some that blue-screen before you can say "blue screen".

Well they're not perfect of course, but in my experience they're so much more of a pleasure to use than a PC. Take my problem yesterday for example: format and reinstall aside, it was a piece of cake to link the problem mac to my mac and pull off the data - if I'd had a PC instead, saving that precious data would have been so much harder.

It is indeed andy that you can turn your Mac into a external firewire harddrive to save your data, but bad thing about this is that anyone else could also get to the data this way if he/she has a Mac and a firewire cable. You have root access to the drive which I don't like at all. So every good side has it's bad side as well.

On my PC I always save my important data on another drive then on which I installed Windows... If Windows would crash I format drive C and install it, so it's not so hard to get your data safe. But a backup somewhere else is always the best option.

Funny. I work as an IT admin in a Microsoft-environment, and that's exactly what I tell people about Windows and PCs...

One of the nice things Leopard added is that if you're using Time Machine you can boot the Leopard disk and then reinstall the whole system intact from your Time Machine backup.

Came in handy when the cat knocked my Macbook Pro on the floor and crashed the hard disk. It even handled the larger replacement hard disk without me having to think about it.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to using that. I just bought Leopard but haven't installed it yet. Since both me and my girlfriend have macbooks, I'm thinking about getting a Time Capsule as well (for those that don't know, it's a wi-fi enabled hard drive that any mac in the house automatically backs up to incrementally using Time Machine).

@Digital Anime

As a security pro, I don't see the ability to turn the Mac into a firewire drive as much of a risk. It's just as easy to pull data off an NTFS-formatted drive using a linux bootdisk.

The fact is, if you have data worth protecting, whether on PC or Mac, you need to encrypt it. The Mac does have a built-in encryption feature called File Vault, which can protect the data if the user bothers to turn it on. Of course, it makes turning the Mac into a firewire drive less useful at that point.

Just like anyone can copy any file from your PC by booting from a bootable USB thumbdrive or Linux Live-CD, after which every file on the harddrive will be readable & ready for copying.

Once people have physical access to a computer, there is no security. (barring any full-disk encryption, which noone uses anyway)

I don't have any national secrets on my machine, I'm not worried about MI6 getting hold of my holiday snaps...