mac laptop question

Ray · Jun 20, 2014

My son has a mac laptop that started acting funny.When you open it up you get a blue screen and that little loading spinning thing and nothing else.The local computer people won't work on a mac.Any ideas? Thanks.

Anonymous-0 · Jun 20, 2014

That would be the blue screen of death. Hard drive or motherboard died.

YTSupport · Jun 20, 2014

That may mean that it's trying to get past a disk error. Search up how you stop the boot process and do what's called an "fsck" (I'd do it but you have to know what year and model it is and search specifically, probably better if your son does it).

A lot of times, even though it won't boot normally, you just need to manually run the disk cleanup and after doing that a few times, it will start working again. It's sort of the same thing as you'd do on your PC when you have to boot to safe mode and do a scandisk.

If the disk gets a corruption, it just won't normally boot. The bad news is it may mean the disk is going bad, though not always. If that's true, you have to plug in a new disk and reinstall the OS. If you can get it back up normally, then you can verify the disk repeatedly and see problems crop up again.

Tree-Farmer · Jun 20, 2014

(quoted from post at 19:51:20 06/20/14) My son has a mac laptop that started acting funny.When you open it up you get a blue screen and that little loading spinning thing and nothing else.The local computer people won't work on a mac.Any ideas? Thanks.

1. Boot the Mac in Safe Mode by holding down the Shift key, after the startup tone

Instructions:
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1564

2. If that doesn’t work, you need to start/boot from, either
a) A Boot DVD (or CD) or
b) an External Drive

Google “How to make a boot DVD”
Does he still have his original Mac OS DVDs?

and/or: Do you have an external hard drive?
If you do, or he’s willing to buy one, then:
You should install the Mac OS on the external drive,
then boot from that external drive.

Then possibly, you can back up your data and re-install the Mac OS on your internal hard drive.

Or do additional troubleshooting, to figure out what the problem is.
There are Mac hardware diagnostics that you can get, to figure out where the problem is.

You could just reinstall the Mac OS, but that might erase all your data on the hard drive.

Also, tell him to post the problem description on one of the Mac Support Communities, such as:
https://discussions.apple.com/community/notebooks/macbook_pro

Ray · Jun 20, 2014

Tonight when I open it up the screen lights up and I get a small file folder with a question mark flashing in the center of the file.

Fullers Farmalls · Jun 20, 2014

If those thing scare you(I'm always afraid of screwing something up on my mac) take it to an apple store, or if one of them is to far from you try a Best Buy. They have an amazing support system.

David G · Jun 20, 2014

The hard disks go bad in the Mac's, will act real weird.

I have gone to solid state disks.

Owen Aaland · Jun 21, 2014

(quoted from post at 19:26:03 06/20/14) Tonight when I open it up the screen lights up and I get a small file folder with a question mark flashing in the center of the file.

That means it did not find a bootable device. The hard drive is not being recognized.

mac laptop question

Ray

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Ray

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