[jeff25624]

OK folks, I'm at the end of my rope here...

I've spent the past few days making a switch of MacBooks between mine, and another which was my brother's. Besides the RAM issue which is another story altogether, I was finally able to get everything installed and running.

This morning, I went through and installed all the updates that OS X prompted me to, so this included the security updates, and the OS updates, etc etc. Everything was working fine; updates installed and the computer restarted no problem.

Then, Mom went to turn on her "new" laptop, and the following process occurs.
1. Turn on the Power
2. Chime is played
3. Grey screen appears w/Apple Logo
4. Stays at Grey screen, the spinning bar appears to indicating a loading of the OS
5. After a period of time, computer restarts and the process begins all over again.

I have tried resetting the PRAM, the PMU (Or whatever you call the process involving holding down the power button while its off), and booting into safe mode. I also ran the Install Disc to verify and repair the permissions on the HD, everything was fine, the few permissions that were off were verified and nothing appeared to be wrong with the disc.

I've Googled this question to find an answer, but most people seem to have a slightly different problem than mine. So, any help would be much appreciated.

The computet is a 1.83 GHZ MacBook Core Duo, 512MB of RAM; one of the very first models of the laptop.

[ibook_steve]

You don't mention which OS, but I'm assuming Leopard (10.5). And you don't mention which disks you used to install the OS. If you used a disk from another computer, it's possible that that install disk would not work correctly with your machine. What exactly did you use to install?

Finally, I don't know what the "RAM issue" is, but you've got to get more than just 512 MB in there.

Steve

[seanc]

Yes, do let us know what this RAM issue is. RAM is very cheap and you'll save yourself a lot of headaches (knowing it's fully working) by buying a 2gb set for that Macbook.

[macwall]

most likely it's ram. for some reason ram failure is so common lately.

[Simon]

Boot in verbose mode (hold cmd-v while booting) and let us know what the last output is before the system reboots.