Macbook Pro will not boot up properly

Help!

Events: I attempted to backup with Time Machine. Had an error and attempted to close the progress box, which did not go away. Computer would not shut down with the progress box still up, so I went to force quit Finder. Success, the computer immediately quit the progress box and shut down.

Now I cannot restart my computer. I get the 'donnnng' at startup, the spinning wheel, and then the computer stalls on varying shades of blue & grey screens forever.

I have used 'repair permissions' and 'repair disk' with success (or 'ok') on both.

Is this a problem with my Finder?

Any help would be hugely appreciated. Thank you for your time!

Is the Time Machine drive still physically attached during these boot attempts?

No...time machine drive disconnected

Just a guess, but I'd say if you can't get it to boot at this point, you're looking at doing a reinstall of OS X (non-destructively, you should be able to reinstall over the existing install).

Do I need to speak with Apple to do this without losing data? I have had repeated trouble trying to backup to Time Machine due to errors. I finally found out how to bypass certain files in my backup, and this happens. I have a lot of extremely impt data I need to protect...

Again, thank you so much for your input

jber said:

Do I need to speak with Apple to do this without losing data? I have had repeated trouble trying to backup to Time Machine due to errors. I finally found out how to bypass certain files in my backup, and this happens. I have a lot of extremely impt data I need to protect...

Again, thank you so much for your input

Click to expand...

Assuming that the external is intact (or maybe just needing a repair with Disk Utility), you should be covered as far as your data goes.

Are you using Lion or is this an earlier OS X version? The processes will vary a bit, depending on the version. If it's older than Lion (10.7), it should just be a matter of booting from your System discs and choosing to install on your OS X partition. The data will be preserved, but the OS directories will be overwrtten. I don't believe there's anything Apple would do differently.

If you're really paranoid and have access to another Mac, you could boot the machine in "target disk mode" from another Mac and be able to run a backup of the drive to a different external.

CWA107: I am on Leopard 10.5. I ran disk utility...repaired permissions, repaired disk...said system was ok. I did spend the time to backup data thru target disk mode just to make sure data is safe.

So...I don't know what I'm doing past that. Is there a link you could share that would help me understand the steps to 'install on your OS X partition?'