Black macbook gets to spinning gear and shuts off after almost a minute

Question

Hello All,
this is my first post as it is the first time i haven't found specific answers elsewhere.
My Macbook will go to the grey screen with logo and gear for 30 seconds and i have tried the following.
I have tried to reset the ram with the command function i forget the keys like p r or something, and i finally got the bong noise.
this still didnt help so i tried to get into safe after this noise with the left shift key, and once i let go at the gear, it still shut down after around half a minute 45 seconds.
I then booted into verbose to see what was really causing this shut down after this.
this was the last couple of lines it froze up on before shutting down.
[HCIController][configurePM] power parent ready after 1 tries
[AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement: initialization complete
disk0s2: I/0 error.
disk0s2: I/0 error.
syncing disks... killing all processes
continuing
done
CPU halted
it usually freezes on the line disk0s2:I/0 error for about a mintue, and once the last run from the second I/0 error to the CPU halted rolls onscreen it is around 3 seconds before it shuts down.
For the last i dont know 3 weeks i have gotten every once in a while these messages saying my startup disk was full, even though i had 37 gigs left on the hard drive.
the reason i got here was because i was trying to copy some files from my compact flash recorder to my computer for listening and maybe 10 of the 15 copied and said the rest could not be transferred because of the disk being full. At this point i decided to restart, and it would not come back to desktop. ANY HELP anyone?
thank you so much

Answer 1

Hi,
I'm not really an expert at anything like this, but from the looks of things, it can read the hard disk up until a certain point and then gets an input/output error, can't read the hard disks and just shuts down. If you have a Boot Camp partition, try booting that, it helped me recover some stuff. Or if you have a firewire cable and a computer with a firewire port, connect the two together and hold T when booting up your Mac. If the other computer is a PC w/ Windows, you may have to install HFS drivers like MacDrive (there is a trial, google it), and see if you can copy off any of your files. You could also try an archive and install by booting up from the Mac OS CD that either came with your computer, or if you bought an upgrade disc. If that fails, then your disk is probably dead. If your Mac is still under warranty, try taking it to an Apple Store / authorised service centre etc, some place they will fix it. However, if your Mac is booting up to a certain point, it could be dead software not hardware.