Mega MBP Problems

[jamblo]

I have the following:

A MBP that will not get past the GREY SCREEN OF MISERY.
Safe Mode will not work.
Single User Mode will not work
Booting off the CD using a held down C does not work
The CD I put in was actually a Mac Pro boot disc*, which is all I had to hand.
The aforemented CD will not eject.

I am ballsed if I know how to get around this one.

Please help!

*I should note here that there are no Firewire cables anywhere in the building, so Target Disc Mode is out of the question too.

 

[Zwhaler]

This happened to me, except with a blank CD instead of a Install Disk. Do you have a mouse? If you do, click on hold the mouse when you boot up the computer, and the disk should pop right out. After that, your MBP will work fine, unless something else is wrong.

 

[JDN]

Call apple, sounds serious enough they will take immediate action.

 

[kolax]

Try holding down ALT during the grey screen.

That brings up an option to select a boot partition, but it might help bypass the CD that is inside even if you only have one partition.

 

[crees!]

*I should note here that there are no Firewire cables anywhere in the building, so Target Disc Mode is out of the question too.

Looks like your next course of action is to go out and buy a FW cable and run Disk Utility from another computer.

 

[plinden]

Do you have external firewire and USB peripherals connected? Remove them (except for key board and mouse of course) and reboot holding down the Option key.

There's no guarantee that it'll help, but it does sometimes.

This happened to me when I installed 10.4.9. I thought I'd borked my iMac (first time anything had every gone wrong on a software update) but remembered what I'd read about removing peripherals so didn't panic too much.

 

[e12a]

How far is the closest Apple Store? If its not far, then why the hell tinker with it ? Just go! (given that it still has a warranty)

 

[jamblo]

Well, I went and spent £18 on a firewire cable, and was able to connect it to a g4 powermac. Only after I connected a apple keyboard to the laptop was I able to achieve anything, it appears, for some unknown reason to me, that when the boot dvd is in the drive, the keyboard is useless. In target disk mode only the dvd drive mounted properly, which enabled me to eject the dvd but not fix the hard disk.

I restarted in Single User mode and received a quagmire of errors, and was not able to run fsck successfully.

This morning I put in my MBP install disc, and once again it will not boot. I am unable to get to a suitable keyboard again for atleast a few hours, so I am back to square one.

I've got an awful lot of data I need on this harddrive. I am starting to panic.

Closest store is about 150 miles away

 

[jamblo]

Found a local mender.

£75+vat for data recovery, the rest is covered by warranty.

It'll take about 3 weeks

This is bad... I'd written most of a 2,000 word essay and had the indesign files for a 24 page booklet on there. I've a PDF of the latter, that will have to do, as there's no way I'm going to get it back before the deadline.

POOP.

 

[DaLurker]

Found a local mender.

£75+vat for data recovery, the rest is covered by warranty.

It'll take about 3 weeks

This is bad... I'd written most of a 2,000 word essay and had the indesign files for a 24 page booklet on there. I've a PDF of the latter, that will have to do, as there's no way I'm going to get it back before the deadline.

POOP.

Time to start keeping backups

 

[robPOD]

sucks to be you.

 

[jamblo]

Indeed.

I did back up about 3 weeks ago, so I've got all of last semester's work.

I'm not sure, however, if I managed to back up for 4GB of photos

Well, it's my birthday in a couple weeks, I'm going to ask my parents for an external hard drive. Then I will get some software that does the backing up for me once a week, or something.

Any suggestions?

Today I am on my archaic PC, trying to install my printer so that I can print this ruddy book!