[paulos_pdx]

I've been having problems getting my MacBook to start up. Recently it started shutting down shortly after the spinning spokes appeared. I tried starting up with Command-V and got (after a lot of other stuff) the following message: "synching drives...killing all processes."

Three more words, on single lines appear below it, something about CPU halted.

Any idea how to work around this, or is this a major repair?

Thanks!

[Eriamjh]

Syncing drives? Do you have external drives or a Time Machine attached? Disconnect them and try again.

[Simon]

Launch the Mac in verbose single-user mode. Run fsck- fy. Repeat until it doesn't report any errors.

If that doesn't help, see if setting up a new user account and running from that helps.

[P]

Syncing in this context just means that it is writing from the disk cache back to the actual drive (executing all deferred writes). Killing all processes means that any process that hasn't shut down yet is forcibly quit. CPU halt is simply another way of saying that the computer is shutting down. All of these are common things that happen when the system is shutting down, they are not the cause of it. If you are looking for the cause, you have to look further up. Something is initiating a controlled shutdown.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Simon 

Launch the Mac in verbose mode. Run fsck- fy. Repeat until it doesn't report any errors.

If that doesn't help, see if setting up a new user account and running from that helps.

You mean single user mode.

[Simon]

Yep.