Stuck on the blue screen...

[ktlu]

So, the other day my friend's macbook was acting sluggish (the mouse was responding very slowly to movement on the trackpad, etc) and he restarted it. Upon trying to start up again the computer won't make it past the chime and stays on the blue start up screen with the spinning wheel in the middle. Normally I am sure he would just go to the apple store but we are in Belize for 4 months and there is no one to be found anywhere who knows anything about macs.

Anyone have any ideas of a remedy or is he screwed until we get back to the States?

 

[ontwosticks]

Shitty, I had that happen last year one time. I called the help line and they couldn't do anything, so i had to go to the apple store and had to have my hard drive replaced. Hopefullly thats not the case for your friend.
In other news...try pulling the battery out, holding down the power button for a few seconds then putting the battery back in and starting up. It's a hard restart, drains all the power out of the system and restarts it.
Do you have the cd that came with the computer? Try puttin that in and starting off of it.

 

[Love_Wins.]

Best guess is a physical HD failure.

Don't continue to try'n boot the machine, no telling which spin up of that drive will be it's last, and you wanna try'n recover data if possible.

Go get a copy of DiskWarrior, boot from that and copy your files to an external drive.