Startup failure - blue screen and mouse cursor, no progress

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I understand this may have been addressed before but none of the searches I ran yielded any conclusive solutions to this problem. I have a first generation 17" Macbook Pro running Tiger that has not had anything go wrong in the past until now and the issue was urgent enough to merit a new thread.

My MBP has been running very short on hard drive space and I have been meaning to purchase an external. Unfortunately, I have not been able to back up my existing hard drive yet. Down to about 80MB of space (low virtual memory caution), I restarted my computer. When it booted back up the screen went through the normal gray screen, then blue screen, then the apple with the progress bar running, and stopped at another empty blue screen with just the cursor. When I pressed force quit to shut down, the screen flashed a lighter shade of blue but I had to press the power button manually to turn it off. I tried to restart in safe mode but it just stalled indefinitely at the progress bar screen so I manually shut down again.

Is there any possibility that my hard drive has failed/crashed? I don't hear any grinding or clicking noises, just the usual whirring. Of course this is what I'm most afraid of.
My theory is that there's not enough space to load the usual startup material and that's why it's stalling on that blue screen. I also can't find my original disk so that may not be an option.

I appreciate any feedback at all, thank you.
 
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MacBook Blue screen

Hi, I am having the same issue with my Macbook now. As what I have done previously, using the startup disk and reboot the system while pressing the "C" key will make it boot rom the cd. Then go to "Utilities" and click on the "Disk Utility" to do a repair iption. This will usually help.

Or you my try to reboot it in a safe mode by restarting it and press the "Shift" key. The thing about all this, is to get the system to startup and quickly go to the "Disk Utility" and get it repaired. That should do the job. And rebooting the system while pressing all the key option may not get it to work in the first try. You just to do this over a couple of tries like what I have experienced. It should be able to login. Good luck.!
 

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