MacBook Loading Screen Hang

[RichBowman]

Hi all,

Little bit concerned about my MacBook (black 2008 C2D 2.4 version) – I restarted it the other day which just resulted in the grey loading screen hanging. Occasionally there’d be a loading bar across the bottom (never seemed to compete) and other times the spinning wheel would be the only thing present.

I tried the NVRAM, PRAM and SMC, battery out etc... to no avail. When I managed to get it to boot with the snow leopard DVD (took much longer than I remembered before), and ran Disk Utility there was an error: something about a ‘Btree error’, which it couldn’t fix, so I erased/re-formatted and the error is now gone).

When trying to restore from a Time Machine backup (booting from the DVD), the same thing happens (and it takes best part of 2 ½ hours) – grey loading screen hang. I’ve tried this for several of the time disk backups (tired earlier ones in case there was something wrong with the last back-up).

However, if I do a fresh install (which is quite annoying as I’ll have to reinstall programmes/photos/music and all my settings etc) it seems to work okay.

My initial thought was that the HD was on its way out, but I’m a bit surprised that I managed to do a clean re-install okay, and (so far) seems to be working. If it’s a case of the HD failing, I’m not too worried about getting a new one – I can sort that out pretty easily and it’s only about £45 or so for a new (possibly bigger/better) one. I’m pretty sure I can install it too. What I’m not keen on is buying a new one and there being a much serious problem that’s causing this...

Anyone seen this before or any thoughts on what could be causing it?

Cheers in advance,

Rich

 

[pingwing]

Shouldn't your time machine backup cover the applications folder??

It does sound like a hard drive on the way out, some guy that lived with me last year had the same macbook and had the same problem with it all just dieing one day, but he couldn't recover it. Plus he was too cheap to get the snow leopard disc for 25 quid...

Would go ask the apple store if they can tell you if its a hard drive failure though as appointments are all free, if it is just that then you can just sort out a new one for your self as that's user serviceable (they didnt complain at the ssd in mine)

 

[RichBowman]

Hi,

Thanks for your reply - I'll try and pop to the apple store sometime next week and see what they say.

I've managed to get all the folders from my time machine back up - so with the applications is it just a case of moving the contents into the applications folder? I know there's no 'registry' as such like in Win, but will it cause any issues?

Cheers,

Rich