[Son of Narnia]

hi. dont know what happened but i startup my PB and i get to the grey screen with the apple logo and the spinning gear.........forever. sometimes i hear a beep at the beginning before the startup chime, but not all the time.

i have tried:
- getting into safe mood (wont get in)
- ran disk utility from the install disk and ran 'repair disk' and got back "first aid failed. the underlying task reported failure on exit." it was checking "catalog file" and reported that "keys our of order."
- reset PRAM

can anyone help?

[wizz0bang]

I've had this happen twice now... I really wish I had a good idea of what causes it (porbably many possibilities). In my case, simply powering it down (holding the power button for several seconds) and restarting has brought it back ok. Hopefully I'll be as lucky in the future.

[Raining Down in Texas]

I have had the ever spinning gear start happening in the last few days on my 1 GHz TiBook. Eventually (after 30 minutes or so), it will start up and the system will behave normally. After the third forced reboot, disk utility now says that the disk SMART system is reporting that the disk is failing. I did a backup yesterday ago; I'm now cloning the drive to a firewire disk and plan on getting a new drive tonight.

[ryarber]

I had this issue once after a powerbook was dropped and trashed the hard drive. Can you boot from the restore CD? If you can, it is probably a problem with the hard drive. You might try tech tool pro, or boot up from the install disk, back up any important data from your drive and do a low level reformat (zero all data) and then restore the system.