Catastrophic Failure
January 19, 2008
Jim’s computer had been acting peculiarly the past few days. It was randomly not recognizing external drives after they slept and woke. It was hanging on restart. But today, today it didn’t just hang on restart and boot properly after another restart. Today it failed to finish booting to OSX at all.
On restart after the last software upgrade it hung. For over half an hour. After a hard forced shutdown and boot it gave the Apple Setup screen. It will let you go through all the setup. Then it loops back to the first Setup screen.
It will not boot from a Leopard DVD in the internal drive.
It will boot from an external DVD drive when the proper key combination to do so is held during boot. Unfortunately, when it does boot you get the same looping Apple Setup screen as before, but with the pretty Leopard background so you know it booted from the DVD.
Jim’s computer has already been taken in to our local Apple authorized repair center. They are sending it to Bangkok for repair under the AppleCare we wisely purchased a few months before moving here. It will take 2 to 4 weeks for the repair. Until then, he has a Macbook.
