[Colonel Panic]

A friend is abroad & is having big problems with his MacBook, and as his chief Tech Support (poor man) I have now run out of ideas ...

Apparently the MacBook won't boot up - it is stuck at the end of the white "progress" bar. He can still hear it playing the music it was playing before it went wrong, but even letting it run out of battery, when plugged in again the music re-starts but it still won't complete the boot up process.

He has tried holding the power button down for an extended period, but that doesn't work, nor does holding Shift to start in Safe Mode, nor does Shift-Control-Option & the power button for 10 secs followed by just the power button.

I am not sure which OS it is on (nor will he now be able to check), but it is 2-3 years old.

Any suggestions would be gratefully appreciated (RobP look away now )

TIA

[stevelup]

I'd suggest booting whilst holding CMD+V to get a verbose boot.

This may not actually provide any useful info, but it will at least confirm that the keypresses are being recognised and that he has the right 'knack'. Grab a photo of the screen after everything has stopped moving.

Just be be clear, the best strategy for hitting the buttons is to power the machine off completely, then turn it on and immediately begin pressing the keys. Don't hold the keys whilst powering on. Also, don't let go until you've actually seen the desired result.

The fact he can hear music makes absolutely no sense at all, that is just plain bizarre. At what point in the boot process does the music come back? Did he not have a password on the machine. I'm really struggling to see how this is possible!

You could try 'single user mode' which is CMD+S

Letting the battery run down does nothing on a Mac as the machine will hibernate to disk before the battery actually expires. Unlike on PCs, this actually works every time! My gut feeling is that the machine simply isn't getting fully shutdown.

Safe boot clears the hibernation file though. I still wonder if the keypresses are even working, hence suggesting CMD+V which is completely obvious when it worked.

[PaulSS]

I had similar symptoms with one of my MacBook Pros and it turned out to be a knackered hard drive (using such technical jargon you can see my 'A' level computer science isn't wasted). In the end the only thing I could do was install a new one and restore my data and files from Time Machine back-ups and iCloud. Hopefully your friend has backed-up his 'stuff' or else it gets a bit more expensive and a bit more hit and miss to try and recover data from the old drive.

With a bit of luck, though, I'm wrong and I would suggest taking the machine to the local Mac store and letting the geeks (as they call themselves) have a look. They've got some gizmos they can plug into the machine to see what is happening during the boot sequence.