MacBook Pro won't boot up-stuck after logon screen

Posted:
in Genius Bar edited August 2014
I have a 2 month old MacBook Pro. It has worked fine but last night I left it on with a lot of applications open. This morning all the apps were locked up and I was just getting the beachball. I was unable to quit any of them or even get to the point of restarting the computer. Once I did I was unable to boot. I get to the logon screen where I enter my password. I get all the way to the screen where I have my background but all I have is the upper right part of the screen (around a square inch) where you see the blue magnifying glass that you use for Spotlight. I get nothing else, no dock, pull down menus, etc. I have gone as far as putting the OS Tiger Boot Disk in and using the Option key to start from CD but then during the boot I get that black screen where it says I need to restart my computer and to hold down the power button.

Any ideas of what I can do?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 7
    Reset the PRAM... on startup hold Option-Apple-P-R after you hear the bell sound. Should help.
  • Reply 2 of 7
    Thanks for the suggestion. I did this but unfortunately am having the same probelm. Any other ideas? The fortunate thing is I tried another OS X Tiger Disk from a MacBook pro and it worked okay for booting into Disk Utility and things like that. I still am having the same problem though.
  • Reply 3 of 7
    lundylundy Posts: 4,466member
    Well, if you got a kernel panic when booted from the DVD then you've done the hard part - determined that it is most likely a hardware problem. Of course it's a bit confusing that another DVD would boot, but sometimes hardware problems are intermittent.



    Before checking hardware, see if it will boot with the Shift key held down (safe mode) or if it will boot with Command-s held down. That might give more information.



    (Since you got past the login screen, it still could be a problem with that account. If you are ever able to get logged in, make a new test user account and log into that.)



    See if it will boot the Hardware Diagnostic DVD.



    The hardware things to check are



    - reset the Power Management Unit: remove battery, unplug from power and then hold down the power button for 5-10 seconds



    - Connected USB and/or FireWire devices or cards - remove all of them



    - RAM: if you added any, remove it and revert to the Apple RAM.

    - If only the original RAM is there, remove one of the two DIMMs and try to boot. Swap that DIMM to the other slot if it still crashes. Then try the other DIMM the same way.



    - If none of that works, you could try reinstalling the OS but with a hardware problem you may wind up getting stuck halfway through and have no way to check any hardware problems.



    Moving to Genius Bar.
  • Reply 4 of 7
    Hello I'm having a similar problem and was wondering if someone could help ? My mac is frozen on the white screen that appears when you first turn it on. There's also the pinwheel that keeps going around. Does anyone know what to do?
  • Reply 5 of 7


    My whole classroom of MacBooks had this problem today. The tech department sent our best guy down but he couldn't figure it out. He thought it might have been a network problem but he could not even login to local accounts.

     

  • Reply 6 of 7






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  • Reply 7 of 7

    If there is registry errors of if some problem with installed Mac applications then MacBook Pro won't boot up and displayed error message on the screen. In this case you can use Mac data recovery process to fix Mac errors and to restore Mac data. This is one of the best solution of the Mac issue. Cause of the problem might be vary device to device but this problem is common with most of the Mac users. If you are trying to fix the MacBook Pro error then fix this error easily.

    http://www.restoremacdata.com

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