White Screen of Death

Ok so last night i had my macbook set up in my room just on and i went downstairs and came back up and it was frozen. This is definitely not normal so i restarted it and now it won't boot past the white screen.

The chime plays and then it sits at the white screen. I tried booting off a bootable external hd holding the alt key when i started it and the mouse came up to select the disk i wanted to boot from but nothing came up. So i tried putting my snow leopard install disk to boot from that and it did the same thing, came up with the mouse but no disks to boot to.

I then proceeded to try and put the external hd into my macbook so see if the drive was confusing it but yet again just the white screen.

I have a feeling the logic board died but i really hope it didnt?

Does anyone have ANY ideas? I'm planning on taking it to an apple repair shop so they can do a hardware test on it to see what it is.

Feel free to email me at [email protected], message me here, or just comment back.

Thanks in advance,
Jeremy

Before taking it on in to be repaired, try resetting the PRAM/NVRAM. Follow directions in this Apple KB article.

Regards.

chscag said:

Before taking it on in to be repaired, try resetting the PRAM/NVRAM. Follow directions in this Apple KB article.

Regards.

Click to expand...

Unfortunately i tried that already too

I honestly don't know. Have you tried pressing the 'c' key while booting to directly boot from the CD/DVD? Or Cmd-Option-Shift-Delete? Both will do the same thing apparently.

I'd also try disconnecting the battery and just use AC power to see if that works. I know it doesn't make any sense, but I have found in the past that it does work and replacing the battery was the only thing to do.

Otherwise, if it's an old Macbook; time to get a new one. Or just get it repaired. Good luck.

okay, first of all, this problem came first on the early iMac G5,
the good news is: your macbook isn't broken,
the bad news is: you WILL lose all your data!

to fix it can be done in 2 ways:
1: (requires Firewire connection on your macbook, and a second mac with firewire)
Turn off your macbook, start up holding the [F] key. this will boot your macbook in Firewire target disk mode.
on the other computer, the disk will become visible.
Run an erase with DiskUtility. and reboot from MAC OS cd/dvd

2:
(requires external CD-reader)
Connect the CD player to your macbook with a MAC OS cd/dvd inserted.
Boot up holding [COMMAND] or [ALT]
wait a little while, the cd player should become visible, choose that,
and run DiskUtilty to erase your disk.
install mac os.

Sorry for the bad news.
Hope you'll get it running again.

jeltekalkman said:

okay, first of all, this problem came first on the early iMac G5,
the good news is: your macbook isn't broken,
the bad news is: you WILL lose all your data!

to fix it can be done in 2 ways:
1: (requires Firewire connection on your macbook, and a second mac with firewire)
Turn off your macbook, start up holding the [F] key. this will boot your macbook in Firewire target disk mode.
on the other computer, the disk will become visible.
Run an erase with DiskUtility. and reboot from MAC OS cd/dvd

2:
(requires external CD-reader)
Connect the CD player to your macbook with a MAC OS cd/dvd inserted.
Boot up holding [COMMAND] or [ALT]
wait a little while, the cd player should become visible, choose that,
and run DiskUtilty to erase your disk.
install mac os.

Sorry for the bad news.
Hope you'll get it running again.

Click to expand...

I just tried that too. =[ the logic board is fried....

Welp anyone looking to sell a new macbook pro message me and ill look into. Thanks everyone for all the help!

Jeremy

Help

I'm trying to fish around and see if there's any chance I can save the data -specifically my photos- that's on my Macbook... from what I see posted in these threads it's not looking good but I would be absolutely devastated if they're lost... I'm not computer saavy and can't follow most of what's being discussed here... Basically over the past few days I noticed that my computer was slowing down at a fantastic rate... I tried deleting old files in the hopes that maybe I just overloaded it but by that point it took five minutes to complete a single function, and then just gave up completely. I was only able to back up a small number of my files on to an external... Now when I turn it on it will briefly flash to that white screen with the apple on it and then turn to a white screen with a circle and a slash... then flashes white completely. None of this bodes well for my my photos... I know it sounds terribly irresponsible of me to not have backed them up before hand but I've been traveling in some fairly remote places and the hardrive I did have died an untimely death in the middle of the desert... I'm now in Sri Lanka and am searching around for a repair place but wanted somebodies opinion... Please... is there ANY way I can save my photos? Barring death or serious injury to myself or those I love this is pretty much the worst thing that could happen to me...

I think you still may have a chance to recover your data, but it may require you to remove the internal hard drive and use a device like this to mount the drive as an external USB drive on another computer. Then you can run a data recover utility like this to recover your information.

Or any of these options:

http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/os...541-macintosh-os-x-data-recovery-options.html