IBook freezes on Apple logo white screen, NO spinning rainbow wheel

Question

Hello,
I bought my iBook 12" 1.33Ghz used in May. It has worked flawlessly until two nights ago when I was surfing the web via Airport. Everything started to take forever to load, the spinning rainbow wheel appeared several times, and applications took minutes to switch between. Since the iBook had been on for a few days, I thought it was time to do a reboot to fix whatever was backlogged in the system. It didn't want to respond, so I force quitted all programs. I could click on the blue logo and hit shut down or restart, but they didn't do anything towards a shut down. I finally held the power button to force a shut down. Ever since, when I power up, I get the Apple chime, a gray screen (for less than a second) and then the white screen with the gray Apple logo. There is NO spinning rainbow wheel, as others with similar sounding problems have mentioned. I've cleared the PRAM and PMU, but they didn't help anything. Holding Shift on startup does not do anything differently. It still just freezes on the Apple logo for hours. I did not get a Mac OS X startup disk with my computer. What else can I do to troubleshoot this? Please help, this is my first Mac, and up until 3 days ago, I had all but sworn off PC's, now this thing is acting up too!
Also, I'm guessing which version of Mac OS X I have, is there anyway to confirm without booting? Holding option is the only thing I have found to give me a different startup process, and the mouse pad is very sluggish and there's a watch logo for 20 seconds or so on it.

Answer 1

Hello! Since you don't have the startup disk your best shot is using fsck. Tom
when you re-start, hold down the apple key AND the "S" key You'll start up into a command line interface.. it'll look strange but just hang in there. When it's done booting up, you should see something that looks like this: localhost:/ root# at this point, type in 'fsck -f" please note the space before the dash, and of course, ignore the quote marks, then hit return You computer will no go thru some low level checks on your HD. Most likely you'll get a list of a few files that have problems and this procedure will fix them. This should take about 2 or 3 mins, so don't be in a rush. When the line says "VOLUME WAS MODIFIED", this means that changes were made. At this point you should be back at the same localhost:/ root# prompt. run fsck -f again. Wait for it to finish. if you continue to get the "Volume was modified" message, continue to run fsck -f until you'll get a prompt that says The Volume(your HD) appears to be ok, again with the localhost:/ root# prompt. AT this point, type reboot, hit enter and your computer will start up normally. This is not difficult, but you may want to give it a shot when your feel you have a few moments where you can attempt something new and not stress too much.