Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

chrisdisregard · Apr 15, 2009, 08:23 PM

I've got a white macbook C2D that froze up on me while shutting down last night. Hung on the beachball, so I just held down the power button till it shut off. Starting up today I just got a blank grey screen. Left it for a few minutes, still nothing, so I shut it off and started up again. This time I got the no startup disk blinking question mark folder. Tried restarting with cmd+opt+P+R, but it still left me with the grey screen. Tried inserting the CD and starting up while holding down C and that still hangs at the grey screen. No blinking folder or anything. There's no apple store for me to take it into around here. I'm out of ideas. Anyone else have any?

chrisdisregard · Apr 15, 2009, 08:37 PM

After a few tries I got it to start from the CD, but disk utility doesn't show a hard drive at all, just the DVD drive. I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess the hard drive is shot?

Cold Warrior · Apr 15, 2009, 08:38 PM

Reset the SMC then try to boot from the CD.

Simon · Apr 16, 2009, 01:36 AM

Try again following CW's advice.

But yeah, could be the hard drive's toast. If DU doesn't see the drive at all you'll know. Fortunately swapping the drive on a MB is very easy and 2.5" drives are really cheap. There's a lot to chose from between 250GB/5400rpm for $58 shipped and 500GB/7200rpm for $140.