[mrantonsen]

I had it for 2,5 years now! I have installed and formatted the HDD several times! When I bought it used from a contact in Oslo it contained with OSX Panther. I knew that I needed a systems disk in order to make it work properly. So I also bought a OSX Leopard OSX8,5 disk and I reformatted and reinstalled the OSX Leopard. I have done this several times now since 2008. But right now I cannot do this proceedure. I have tried with holding in the ALT key in the startup sequense and also the C key to start directly from the DVD-CD.

I have reecently uninstalled the system fix software called MACKEEPER and XSUPPORT. These two software packages are good at finding faults and viruses. But they can cause problems of many kinds also.

Has any of you been into one of hese problems.

When I restart with the systems CD it always ends up with the grey skreen with the darker gray apple logo and underneath you have this roundabout animation running.

Does anyone have any suggestions on what to do?

[Waragainstsleep]

Well firstly I wouldn't run antivirus. I guarantee neither of those programs has ever found a virus on your PowerBook.

Try booting holding Command-V. This should give you a black screen with white text which will hopefully tell you where it is getting stuck.

[chipchen]

1. Optical drive gone bad? Or more likely, disc is bad? Scratched?

2. Sometimes, with a bad hard drive, it will cause issues allowing other boot up devices...

3. Where are you from? Norway I assume? Any Apple service providers near you?

[mrantonsen]

Thanks for your helpful suggestions! But it did not work! Is it possible to use an external USB disk to boot from? I made my LaCie external HDD bootable but it does not find it in the bootsequense. So is there any command I can use to change that? I thought I could repartition the internal HDD and format it! When looking in the Disk Utility I see 9 partitions. 8 of them is at 34 kb size and are not mounted. The utility does not show any info about disks. Is this normal? I have a feeling it is not?

[mrantonsen]

Must I have a FIREWIRE EXT DRIVE maybe??

[JeffHarris]

Reinstalling the system is a Windows fix. I've RARELY been forced to do it with Mac OS X.

First, get a copy of DiskWarrior!
It's not cheap, but DW has saved my Macs and many clients' Macs when odd problems were plaguing them, even when the troubles seemed hopeless. It's been around for years and is solid, robust, simple and trusted. I've looked at MacKeeper, but have heard nothing about it.

You can either boot from the DW CD, or put a copy onto a bootable external hard drive, reboot from there and run it. Use a FireWire external drive. I'm not sure if PowerBooks can boot from a USB drive.

The other system maintenance utility I use is Cocktail for running UNIX maintenance scripts and clearing caches, etc.. Onyx is similar and is free. I use Onyx sometimes, but Cocktail seems a bit more robust and has a much better interface.

So I run Cocktail, then DiskWarrior.
99% of the time this will clear up any problems.

DiskWarrior 4 - The Disk Utility for Mac Disk Repair, Mac Directory Repair, Mac Disk Recovery, Mac Data Recovery
Maintain - Cocktail - Overview
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