My MBP won't boot :( Help much appreciated

Hi everyone,

I recently made a decision to switch to Mac, about a month ago as I am in the design industry and macs suit my work more than well. I have the current 17inch MacBook Pro with the 3,06ghz chip, 8gb ram and 500gb 7200rpnm harddrive.

It started when I had to do a force shutdown after the computer hung up during a restart. Ever since then I am not able to boot the computer anymore. The boot process stops at the screen with the Apple logo and the spinning gear icon. The gear spins but nothing happens. I tried to do a safe boot with the status messages, and it stops at a particular point. I have taken a picture of the screen so maybe someone can recognize what is wrong. I am a mac novice so I didnt wanna do anything that might break the thing and cause data loss, rather ask the experts

Here is the screen.
http://pic.phyrefile.com/a/al/alok/2010/03/25/DSC_1754.jpg

Thanks in advance!!

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Alok

Since your machine is new, it's probably best to take it on in to Apple and have them trouble shoot it for you. Are you close to an Apple store? If you are, make an appointment with the genius desk.

The screen shot you attached is hard to read but it looks like a kernel fault which could be related to file or folder corruption due to the forced shutdown.

You can try booting the machine with your Snow Leopard DVD (hold down C key as soon as you hear the chime), and run some checks.

After it boots with the DVD, cancel out the installation process by selecting "Utilities", "Disk Utilities" from the top menu. Then select the "First Aid" tab. Do a verify and repair on the hard drive. (highlight your drive on the left side)

Keep running the verify and repair until all errors are cleared.

After that, do a "repair permissions".

If that doesn't help, it's best to contact Apple as I indicated above.

Regards.

lokky said:

It started when I had to do a force shutdown after the computer hung up during a restart.

Click to expand...

This is the key sentence. You almost certainly interrupted the machine during a firmware or system software update (which can sometimes take a while), thus damaging the directory.

If you were my client, I'd be on my way to your house with a copy of Disk Warrior, which would likely repair things at least to a point where you could boot. Failing that, however, I'd suggest you try hooking the computer up to another Mac via Firewire so you can do a backup via Target Disk Mode, then take it to a tech.

double that - backup using Firewire before messing with anything as chances are you might loose you data and if you are not aware of how to do it, I would recommend getting an external firewire supported drive and head to the Apple store...

Thanks everyone for the help, I will try backing up the drive and keep you updated on the progress