Help!!!

i recently purchased a used macbook 1,1. 60 gig hd and 1 gig ram. the battery is messed up so it only runs off of wall power, but it works great. i was updating leopard the other day and while it was rebooting my little cousin closed the lid. when i turn it on it says to either hold down the power button for several seconds or press the restar button b/c the computer needs restarted. i've held down the power button till i'm blue in the face and it still goes back to that screen. i'm a school teacher so i need to get it fixed asap. any help is MUCH appreciated!

Maybe the battery is dead...and you need a new one.

- Nick

It sounds like you are getting the gray restart screen. Is this correct? As you are aware now interrupting an update is not a good idea. If you have a backup of your hard drive then it's an easy process to reinstall Leopard and then restore from your backups. This is assuming that the hard drive or anything else wasn't damaged.

If you don't have a backup then you are going to have to run some tests to see what's wrong with your computer. Hopefully you still have your Leopard OS disc. Put it in and hold down C when starting up and open up Disk Utilities. Verify that hard drive is okay. If it needs repairing then do so and then run the test again. If it's not the hard drive then things will get more complicated and you might want to take it into an Apple store to get looked at.

i don't have the disc. i don't mind buying one if it fixes the problem. here's the thing though...i popped in a music cd the other day just to see if that would spur it on...now i cant get it out. any suggestions? thanks for the help btw

If you don't have the Leopard disc then it might be hard to get one at an affordable price since Apple is no longer officially making them. People have reported that if you call Apple they might provide one for a reasonable price.

As for the stuck disc, try rebooting the computer and then immediately hold down the trackpad until the disc ejects. Since you can't fully boot into your computer it may or may not work. It's worth a try at least.

Did the seller tell you that the Shift keys didn't work?

shift keys? no, didn't know anything about that. i wanted to upgrade to snow leopard anyways, could i get its disc and reboot?

Oh, so that's the problem! When you hold down the Shift key, any letter that you strike then becomes an upper case letter. Pretty nifty, eh?

You mentioned that you have Leopard, so you are eligible for the $29 Snow Leopard disc. There's no guarantee that this will solve the problem. Perhaps if you visit an Apple Store and tell them you want to buy the SL disc IF it will allow you to boot up your MacBook, maybe they'll go for that.

macdame said:

i wanted to upgrade to snow leopard anyways, could i get its disc and reboot?

Click to expand...

Yes, you should be able to use the Snow Leopard disc to run Disk Utilities. Just don't reformat the hard drive if you want to save any lost data. You still didn't say if you have a backup of your data.