help with macbook

[swallowedAfly]

hi. I've been away for a week and on coming home turn it on and it sort of boots up but goes immediately to sleep and can only show desktop for a second it two before going back to sleep.

Fan isn't going but it isn't hot.

Left it on overnight to warm up and eliminate battery issues but no change. Can't restart as can't get to it and using power button doesn't make it reboot, just sleep. It was working fine before i went. On phone so excuse typos etc.

Help!!!!!

shameless bump

i DID ask ds who has one, he just said take it ot the MAC store

this might help

thanks samebut - lots of diskOs2:IO error
followed by localhost kernel[0]

so out of my depth

Take the battery out completely, and using mains power only, restart it and see what happens.

You may have to start up using the disc that came with it, run disk repair and repair all the permissions.

Actually, I just remembered, I had he same problem with my macbook air, or rather DH did after I gave it to him, it needed a new power cable, sometimes the magsafe gets damaged, even though you can't see if it has.

I tried a new one in the Apple store and it worked so that was the problem, a new cable needed, I bought one on ebay at half the price as I had a spare we could use until it arrived

Are you able to boot it from the original CD that came with it? If you can do that (hold down the C key when booting up with the CD in) you will be able to run Disk Utility and fix the disk error, probably. Repair permissions on the disk as well. There is another possible source of this problem to do with your preferences files but try the CD boot/disk utility method first.

hi i can boot it from the install disc but can't see the screen for more than a second to be able to do anything.

It won't start in safe mode.

I can get into single user mode and run fsck stuff till it says it's fine but reboot sees the same prob.

Did the take out battery hold down power key malarchy to reset the power thing to no avail. Thinking it must be a hardware issue now?

Certainly been educational so far (reading tech stuff on support forums) but haven't got anywhere.

Thanks for suggestions so far

Right! I've managed to enter in safe mode with the start up disk in and select to archive old system to a file and install a new leopard operating system. Currently it is very slowly checking the installation disc.

Serious learning curve!

I'm hoping like mad this gets it working somehow and that there'll be a way of extracting the data from the old system. Way out of my depth here but desperate to get all of ds's photos etc off of there.

Learned my lesson about backing stuff up

it has downloaded up to 9 mins to go then been stuck at that for about an hour :( help!

It may "fall over" a couple of times before you manage to get it to go all the way through.

Good luck, this happened with DD's macbook and she lost masses of photos, fortunately most were also on facebook!

I have a Time machine, so it backs up al the time for me. It is fascination looking bak through it, it opens like a rolodex ad you slect what you want.

Well worth the cost as it backs up all 4 machines in the house.

thanks ali. have managed to do it and the old os is there in a folder but at the minute i'm too scared to push trying to open things from there. hoping i can take it to someone who knows what they're doing to try and get the data from it - i want my photos!

but overall that i got it working again - i have down so much trawling for data and ideas - i really thought it was dead for good.

i think some of ds's photos are on discs but the bulk of recent years were just on the comp as i'd been uploading straight from camera to here. i'm actually feeling really grateful that i hadn't gotten around to uploading all that's on the camera as his first day at school and christmas etc is still on the camera.

now having the pain of re-downloading applications etc i'd gotten used to having.

What's in the Users folder? If you've created a new user account as part of the installation process, the original account will be in there, with all the data. You won't be able to access it, but that's where your stuff is. If not, all your photos should be where they were before.

Sorry- that sounds a bit terminal, the "you won't be able to access it" bit. To access it you need to log in as the old user and then it'll be there. Do that by changing settings in System Preferences/Accounts.

prism: i've managed to go into the old system folder and although so far i can't open any applications in there or drag them over i can get into my downloads folder and from there am dragging photos over to the new system - in downloads is everything i've transferred from camera to comp so a good proportion of all the photos i think.

i can't log in as old user i don't think - the system is not operational itms.