MacBook Pro Won't Boot Up

[Fellows]

Was wondering whether anyone could help me.

I attempted to run a game on the windows XP portion of my laptop, which failed to respond. I could not close it, or shut down properly and so was forced to power down. When i booted up and pressed alt to select the windows partition the screen just went greyed out. I therefore powered down again, and restarted into the OSX portion of my hardrive which was successful.

I tried again a couple of times to access the windows portion of the drive unsuccessfully so i decided to format that partition and reinstall windows with boot camp. I formatted it, but when boot camp restarted the computer to begin windows installation it again just greyed out the screen and stayed like it.

I now cannot boot either OSX or windows at all. The computer makes its 'start up sound' then freezes on a grey screen no matter how long it is left.

Does anyone have any suggestions what to do? Can i boot off of the OSX dvd and reinstall or restore in some way? I am a complete ignoramus, so please dont assume i have any knowledge about what to do...

Any help greatly appreciated...

 

[Sur3Mac]

First take a look at this MacOSX troubleshooting page.

You could try to startup from the Mac OSX Install DVD and hold Cmd-S at the tone, and it'll drop you into a shell. It'll even tell you how to run a file system check (FSCK)

You can also try:
-On startup hold Option+Apple+O+F
-Boot into Open Firmware
-At the prompt type reset-nvram
-Press return
-At the prompt type reset-all
-Press return

Hope this helps

 

[Fellows]

Thanks for the reply.

I did check the troubleshooting page, just wasn't sure what option was best to try first, and if anyone had any tips for the deeply ignorant...!

Ive just managed to boot into OSX, which was a suprise. So i think i'll time machine back a few days and then make sure the hard drives happy and working...

 

[deus_ex_machina]

Good idea to do the file system check in Single User Mode.

Intels do not support Open Firmware, they're EFI now.