MBP problem

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Hi I am new and need some help please!!

I have a 1.5 year old 17" MBP that I just upgraded to snow leopard a couple of days ago.

1st let me say that I have done a lot of reading since this happened and nothing I have read has helped.
Last night I was using my computer and logged off. When I did it just went to a blue screen. And now every time I start it goes to the same screen. The mouse shows up for a second then goes away. The 1st thing I tried to do was boot in safe mode. The only thing that happened is I had the busy circle appear on the blue screen for about 4 seconds then go away then come back this happened for 20min or so then I tried to boot from my original OS CD. This worked I was able to check the drive it seemed ok. Then I tried to archive and install and it failed. Then I booted from the CD again and reset my system password and firmware password. Now I am unable to boot from the CD or use any of the commands like safe mode or single user. Nothing works. Im not sure what to do now. Could it be a hard drive issue? I am a little hesitant to bring it in to apple because of the cost. But if there is a chance I can save the data on my drive I will. Or if not is it difficult to replace the HDD on a mac, it would be a lot cheaper?

Thanks in advance for any help
 
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Your Mac's Specs
2018 15" MBP, 2019 11" iPad Pro, iPhone 11 Pro
Well, if you were able to boot from your install CD I would suggest doing that and going into disk utility and repairing permissions.

But since that is no longer an option and I'm not very experienced with that sort of a problem, I will tell you that it is not difficult to replace the internal drive (lots of video tutorials out there - especially on You tube) and you're looking at maybe $120 for a 500gb 7200rpm.

Just keep that in the back of your mind while someone else on here takes a crack at solving your issues.

Best wishes!! :Smirk:
 
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Thanks for the response.

After a few hours to calm down a little and get some rest (I stayed up all night since 2am trying to figure out as much as I could) I now have a working computer again. I was able to get the snow leopard install CD to boot after a trying a bunch of key combinations. In the end it was only holding down just the "option" key that worked. (from what I read I thought holding down option+c would do it) It allowed me to choose which drive I wanted to boot from then enter my firmware password. Then using MYmacROX response I used the disk utility to check the drive and repair permissions. After that I re installed snow leopard and it worked! Maybe regular leopard failed because I already upgraded. Anyways, it was a tariffing few hours, I dont have too much data to loose, pics mostly. All my music is on an external drive. However, it would take hours to re download and set up everything how I like it. It just was an awful feeling to be looking at a 3k massive paper weight with a blue screen. I think I will be asking Santa for a time capsule this year lol.
So if any one else has this problem where non of the other start up command keys dont seem to work try holding down just the option button during start up.
 
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I'm very happy for you that it turned out well.

Another external HD (500GB - 1TB) to backup to would be a lot cheaper than a Time Capsule. Especially with all the Black Friday deals coming up next weekend. (assuming you live in the U.S.)
 
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I'm very happy for you that it turned out well.

Another external HD (500GB - 1TB) to backup to would be a lot cheaper than a Time Capsule. Especially with all the Black Friday deals coming up next weekend. (assuming you live in the U.S.)
Actually your computer will boot from the install CD if you press and hold EITHER the "C" key OR the "Alt" key when powering up.
 
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at first it would boot from the CD with just the "C" key. However, for some reason that stopped working. Then I kept trying alt+C because I thought from what I read that would boot from the CD and bring up my firmware password prompt (which was not coming up) and at this point safe mode wouldn't even work. Alt brought up a list of where I would like to boot from. I then selected the cd and the password prompt appeared. And it all worked out from there.

Thanks again for the help
 

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