Grey screen with apple logo and spinning gear

I have not used my Mac Book in over six months. I charged the battery, powered it up and and two minutes after booting up, i got the multilingual message "You need to restart your computer."

It is now three days later and I have followed all the recommendations for safe restart, reset the pram, and attempted to reinstall Mac OS X. I followed the instruction with making sure the discs that came with the computer are clean and pressed C after the tone, all I got is the Apple logo with the spinning gear followed by a blue screen and the original "You need to restart your computer" message. The entire process takes about 10 minutes every time.

I would appreciate any suggestions at this point.

I'm coming in late, and I didn't catch the original thread that you are referring to.

If your Mac is still covered by AppleCare, this might be a good time to take it back to an Apple Store or call Apple Support and ship it back to Apple to be fixed.

A Kernel Panic (which is what happened when you got the screen that told you that you needed to restart) is a sign that you have a serious problem.

I'd say that about 80% to 90% of the time kernel panics are due to a hardware problem. In order of likelihood, that problem is usually:

- bad third party RAM
- a bad USB hub
- a peripheral that your Mac doesn't like for some reason (sometimes just a poorly attached cable, or a bad cable, is the problem)

Since you can't startup from your system installer DVD, I'd guess that the chances of your problem being due a software problem are very low. Can you startup with the Shift key held down? If not, then it is almost definitely a hardware problem.

What I would do is to shut down your Mac, uninstall all peripherals other than the Apple-supplied keyboard and mouse, restart and see if that helps. If it does, you can re-attach one peripheral at a time, restarting each time, until you isolate the offending peripheral.

If that isn't a solution, I would remove all third-party RAM and see if that fixes things.

Helpful Web sites:

"Tutorial: Avoiding and eliminating Kernel panics"
Tutorial: Avoiding and eliminating Kernel panics | MacFixIt - CNET Reviews

Troubleshooting Kernel Panics
Isolating issues in Mac OS X

I hope this helps.

___________________________________________

Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)

Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance
OS X Maintenance And Troubleshooting
___________________________________________