I think my computer might of crashed. Need help

Newer macbook pro purchased in late 2009 with snow leopard

I've been having an issue with my macbook for a few days now. A week ago everything was working fine and everytime you would restart it or turn in back on if the battery died, it would boot up quick but it has since then started to run funny. The computer has been partitioned for mac and windows OS for at least a year not but I never actually installed the windows OS. Due to this, I've had to hold down the control key while it boots up to select the mac hard drive before it proceeds.

So basically here is what is going on:

1) when the computer starts up, I have to hold the control key like normal due to the partition. I've had to do this everytime just like any other mac owner who has windows on their computer. Since I never actually installed the windows OS, imaging seeing the screen below except with only the mac HD.

THE PROBLEM: to get to this screen it takes a good 5 minutes or so to get to and it freezes up in doing so. It use to take like 15 seconds.




2) After selecting the mac hd, it just sits there for another 5 minutes until it proceeds to the screen seen below. Again for the mac guys, this is all part of a partitioned setup. When the problem first happened, I got back to my desktop but it took a good 30 minutes while the little spinning thing just rotated. I turned it off again because I was getting on an airplane and tried to turn it back on but this time it just sat on this screen for 2+ hours until the battery died. When I got home, I turned it back on with the screen seen below and left it on overnight but when I woke back up, the screen was still up with the little spinning thing just rotating.



So what exactly could be the issue here? Is it a hard drive issue or a reformatting issue?

Boot off of the CD, run the diagnostics.. if it all comes back NTF (it likely will), repair the disk. If that doesn't fix it, reinstall (archive and install should be the default anymore as I recall).

If at all possible, shut down the machine.. don't just force power off. If you're reading/writing to a file it can easily get munched, which will indeed cause problems.

Dysfunction said:

Boot off of the CD, run the diagnostics.. if it all comes back NTF (it likely will), repair the disk. If that doesn't fix it, reinstall (archive and install should be the default anymore as I recall).

If at all possible, shut down the machine.. don't just force power off. If you're reading/writing to a file it can easily get munched, which will indeed cause problems.

Click to expand...

This. Or HDD might be failing.

Also you dont have to press option every time you boot you can choose the startup disk in OSX so that it knows what you want to to boot from (Settings->Statupdisk-> Cick "Macintosh HD". You can also get rid of that windows partition that you aren't using if you aren't planning on using it. Disk utility allows you to delate partitions and expand other partitions.

thurstmw said:

This. Or HDD might be failing.
.

Click to expand...

It's a possibility, which is why I suggested running diags. One things for sure, no OS likes a forced power down. During start-up is the worst time you can do this actually.

thanks for the quick responses guys. I am going to try to find the original box and hopefully the disk will be in there.

how exactly do you boot off the disk? You just stick it in and turn on the computer?

Here you go, should walk you right through it.

Intel-based Macs: Using Apple Hardware Test

it looks like the comp crashed. I ended up putting the disk in and running a test but it said it was unrepairable. Just reformatted but I lost everything (nothing too important).