Macbook crashes after booting

[CalUK]

Hello, my 2008 Macbook has suddenly started crashing almost immediately and has to be powered off. It does boot, but normally as soon as something is opens it crashes (spinning beach ball at first, the icons still expand when you hover over them, then it Properly Crashes and the icons no longer expand, you can't load the Force Quit function with CMD+OPT+ESC and you have to power it down.)

My housemate and I had a bit of a play around in Single User mode (I think that's it's name, where you boot into The Matrix with Shift and CMD) and deleted Chrome (this ALWAYS crashed) and some other old apps I didn't want, this initially improved matters but now it just goes back to crashing immediately.

I've tried removing the battery and reseating the Ram and HDD to no joy. Is this just an old laptop dying? (It's running OS X 10.5.8 and hasn't been updated in god knows how long, but I don't even know how I'd go about putting a more updated OS on it, especially with the state it's in currently.)

Is there anything I could do to save this? My housemate suggested sticking Ubuntu on it as it's very low resource and I only really use the laptop for browsing the internet/using iTunes and occasionally having a play in GarageBand. I'd like to not bite the bullet and buy something new so any help would be appreciated, thanks.

 

[Slydude]

If you have an OS x DVD boot from that and run Disk Utility to verify the drive. Repair any errors that occur. If you don't have such a DVD try the following:

1. Power on the Mac and press Command S simultaneously.
2. As you probably know you are now in single user mode. When the text stops scrolling down the screen type fsck -fy and press return.
3. After drive verification is complete you should see an update in text at the bottom of the screen. If errors are reported repeat the command until no errors are reported.
4. Reboot the Mac.

I'm looking at a failing hard drive as a distinct possibility. If you are able to get the machine to boot make a backup / clone of your drive ASAP

 

[CalUK]

Hi Slydude, I don't have an OS X disc unfortunately. I've tried to run Disk Utility from the desktop but it just crashes as soon as I try to verify the disk.

Weirdly, I've done that fsck -fy process and it shows everything as working. (Including the HDD!?)

 

[Slydude]

IIRC That is the same hard drive check that would have been performed by Disk Utility.

I re-read your first post. Are you getting past the login screen to the desktop screen? If so, try step two below:
1. Press the power button on the Mac and immediately hold down the shift key till you get to the login screen. This boots into safe mode (similar two Windows safe mode). Somme functions will be disable but it will at least tell us a bit more about what the problem might be.
2. If you can boot normally for even a few minutes try creating a new user account (in Users and Groups or something like that). After the account is created try logging into that account and see how things run.

Let us know the results.

 

[CalUK]

Hello, I've tried this and haven't really noticed any improvement on the other user profile. I can occasionally get onto Safari etc. and browse for 5-10 mins before a crash, but running iTunes or System Preferences tends to crash the machine. It all seems to be a bit random as well - sometimes the machine will crash just trying to logon, other times shortly after logging on, other times after 5-10 minutes of reasonably successful browsing. I wonder whether 'defragging' the hard drive might be worth trying? Although I doubt it'd run for long enough to be able to do it, ha!