Stuck on white screen at boot up

[Canuck09]

I'm trying to figure out what happened to my g/fs Macbook, hoping for some help. It's about 3 years old, runs OS X (not sure on the version but it is updated as needed). Yesterday she was prompted to update a couple programs, not sure which ones. As usual after updating it prompted her to restart the computer which is where the problems started. It now boots to the white screen with apple logo and spinning circle on the bottom, no other symbols/logos appear.

I've read through the sticky at the top of the forum and tried the few things listed. We've tried the PRAM and PMU resets. We've booted into single use mode and tried fsck. The battery is fully charged as well. What should we try next?

Thanks for any help!!

[Canuck09]

As an update to this...

I've been playing around, booted up in Verbose mode and it runs through the startup sequence and gets stuck on...

"/System/Library/CoreServices/loginwindow.app/Contents/MacOS/loginwindow: Login Window Application Started"

Can anyone help us get beyond this? She has OS X 10.4.11 installed.

[dadsgravy]

Archive and install:

Mac OS X: About the Archive and Install feature


Make sure when you update software or if you do archive and install, the computer is plugged into the wall. Never do any updates running off the battery.

Supposedly apple kind of fixed this, but it's always good practice to have the computer plugged in when you update the software.

[Canuck09]

Archive and install:

Mac OS X: About the Archive and Install feature


Make sure when you update software or if you do archive and install, the computer is plugged into the wall. Never do any updates running off the battery.

Supposedly apple kind of fixed this, but it's always good practice to have the computer plugged in when you update the software.

I was just reading up on this actually. Problem we've run into now is she can't find her Install CD/DVD that it would have come with. Seems like that eliminates this as an option now.

I found this on another board, hopefully it's OK to post links to another forum. I'm not sure what the steps described are doing, but does this sound like it might work?

Apple - Support - Discussions - Startup hangs with "Login Window ...

Thanks for your help!!