I desperately need help!
I bought a Powerbook 1.67ghz on eBay and have had it for about a month - everything's been fine since then, until two days ago when I turned it on and wouldn't start up. I get the first couple of grey screens, the grey screen with the apple logo, then the apple logo with the spinning wheel underneath and it stays on that screen forever - I left it for over an hour and nothing more happened.
The machine is under Applecare so I called them yesterday and the tech had me try a few things - the PRAM reset (I think - the one where you hold down shift-option-P-R or whatever!), booting into safe mode, and something else holding down the X while booting - absolutely nothing worked, not even Safe Mode.
I'm visiting family at the moment and the discs that came with the machine are back on the other side of the country, so I can't try anything with them until I get back on Sunday. The problem is that the machine is loaded with 10.5 but the discs I have are for 10.4 - obviously the seller loaded the new OS and then kept it for himself (which I had no problem with at the time) so I would probably have to lose 10.5. I don't really mind doing so because I had 10.4 on my iMac and was more than happy with it and don't see a huge difference between them anyway. What I am worried about - very worried about - is whether using the 10.4 discs will mean wiping my hard drive of all the files and programs. Files I can deal with somewhat as I have most things on disc and not much new on the machine. The programs, however, were installed by the seller and I do not have the installation discs for them. These are programs that I desperately need for my work and to buy them new would cost twice as much as my laptop did! I'm quite sure that the programs on there were legal copies owned by the seller but they usually come with a couple of licenses and I imagine the guy kept the discs so he could install the programs on his new computer too.
Can anyone suggest anything I haven't yet tried to fix this problem - and also let me know if there's anyway I can preserve what's on my hard drive?
I bought a Powerbook 1.67ghz on eBay and have had it for about a month - everything's been fine since then, until two days ago when I turned it on and wouldn't start up. I get the first couple of grey screens, the grey screen with the apple logo, then the apple logo with the spinning wheel underneath and it stays on that screen forever - I left it for over an hour and nothing more happened.
The machine is under Applecare so I called them yesterday and the tech had me try a few things - the PRAM reset (I think - the one where you hold down shift-option-P-R or whatever!), booting into safe mode, and something else holding down the X while booting - absolutely nothing worked, not even Safe Mode.
I'm visiting family at the moment and the discs that came with the machine are back on the other side of the country, so I can't try anything with them until I get back on Sunday. The problem is that the machine is loaded with 10.5 but the discs I have are for 10.4 - obviously the seller loaded the new OS and then kept it for himself (which I had no problem with at the time) so I would probably have to lose 10.5. I don't really mind doing so because I had 10.4 on my iMac and was more than happy with it and don't see a huge difference between them anyway. What I am worried about - very worried about - is whether using the 10.4 discs will mean wiping my hard drive of all the files and programs. Files I can deal with somewhat as I have most things on disc and not much new on the machine. The programs, however, were installed by the seller and I do not have the installation discs for them. These are programs that I desperately need for my work and to buy them new would cost twice as much as my laptop did! I'm quite sure that the programs on there were legal copies owned by the seller but they usually come with a couple of licenses and I imagine the guy kept the discs so he could install the programs on his new computer too.
Can anyone suggest anything I haven't yet tried to fix this problem - and also let me know if there's anyway I can preserve what's on my hard drive?
