Machine won't boot

XP Pro
AMD 64 3000+
MSI K8T NEO MB
I was installing some windows updates and another piece of software at the same time. The other software finished first, so I clicked ok - and it auto-rebooted my machine (gdammit I hate that). Now my machine won't boot at all. Black screen with no data being sent to it, no error messages, codes, beeps ... NOTHING. All the fans are on, the CD light blinks a few times, hard disk seems to spin, but NOTHING AT ALL happens.
What can I do to fix it if I can't get to *ANY* bootable device?
I noticed the cd light blink, so I put the XP install disk in, but that did nothing. At one point after a cold boot, the floppy turned so I popped in a boot disk ... crunch, beep, repeat. That was no help either.
Someone said I should reset the bios/cmos via the jumper on the mobo. Someone else suggested I disconnec the PS for a minute, reconnect and try again.
Ideas? Please help me.
Thanks.

Quote
Someone said I should reset the bios/cmos via the jumper on the mobo. Someone else suggested I disconnec the PS for a minute, reconnect and try again.
...that is good advice...I would add that you unplug (either at the wall or at the back of the power supply) the PSU when you clear the CMOS...clearing the CMOS is a vital troubleshooting procedure...
...what was the other software?..just curious...

Similar Messages

Help - My machine won't boot and I cannot get into the BIOS - 990FXA-GD65

I have been trying to install an AHCI driver for use by WinXP, so far with no success (see this link: https://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?topic=161637.0 )
However, following my last unsuccessful attempt, I had to take a break from running any more attempts and switched off the machine for several days.
I have come back to it tonight and I find that the machine won't boot at all and that pressing DEL or F11 after starting won't take me to the BIOS or the boot menu. The display shows nothing, other than 'No HDMI signal'
Are there any tests I can do to establish what might be wrong?
pbb

Thankfully the machine has come back.
I tried a couple of cmos/battery clears, with no success.
Then I took out one stick of memory, cleared the cmos and it all worked on rebooting!
I put back the memory slug, cleared cmos again and it continues to work!!
What a relief - thanks xmad.

New machine won't boot

I've had this new machine up for about a week and a half, and all of a sudden it started hanging (freezing) on me tonight. Other than the drivers, utilities, etc. that came w/ the various hardware, I haven't installed much software: Office 2007, Firefox, AIM, and one game (TimeShift). Everything was working great until tonight. Except I had noticed that when I left the machine for a while and it went to sleep, when I tried to wake it up by moving the mouse, the screen would come up w/ my background and nothing else. I would have to reboot to get it going again. Tonight it all escalated. It first hung when I was using Firefox. Next time it was after I saw a brief message about an 'access error' on the raid mirror. I then went into the nVidia Control panel, and it froze again. No response from the keyboard or mouse at all. Sometimes, the mouse pointer would disappear completely, and w/ still no response from the keyboard I'd have to reboot. The last time windows was up, I tried to see if the game would start - it froze again. After I pressed the reset button that time, it has not booted again.
I'm using the software raid (Raid 1 mirror), and it says the mirror is "healthy". I can get into the Raid Setup and everything looks fine. But when I get past the post, right when you're supposed to see the Windows moving bar, I hear a faint 'click', and then nothing - black screen. I can also get to the BIOS just fine, and nothing appears to have changed. It's possible that one of the hard drives is bad, but after all the trouble I had trying to get Raid to work on this board (cold boot issue, etc.), I also think that the board may be suspect. I guess I will try disconnecting one of the drives, and see if it will boot off of one or the other. But I would sure appreciate any other suggestions too!
TIA

Quote from: drachenfire on 09-February-08, 14:27:20
Well, I found I can boot off of the first drive (slot Sata 1), but not the second (slot Sata 2). So I guess it might be the hard drive which is having a problem. The odd thing is, that when both drives are plugged in, it won't boot. If I disconnect the second one it will boot. I thought that was the purpose of mirroring - if one drive went bad, it would boot off of the good one, and then you replace the bad one and rebuild your mirror. Perhaps that means there something wrong w/ the nVidia raid?? I've never used raid before on a machine, so I don't have any experience with this sort of thing. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
No, the mirroring means you have a safe copy of your data, you will still need 2 disks........

How to open CD drawer when machine won't boot?

I am having the Firmware default catch error and need to boot from CD, but I cannot get the CD drawer open!
Eject button on keyboard is inop since system won't boot.
Inserting paper clip in hole under CD drawer does nothing.
Help!

If the Mac were normally left unplugged from power, and hence draining the PRAM battery, it could certainly be bad by now. But any Mac that's been on for a year or so isn't likely to be unplugged much! My 700 MHz eMac is still on the original battery (and plugged at all times into an APC BackUPS). Still, the battery could be physically bad. If you have a voltmeter handy, you can check if it's within say 0.1v of the nominal 3.6v while under load (still in the battery holder). You can find the replacement 3.6v lithium 1/2 AA battery online (e.g., cyberguys.com) for around US$11 after shipping/handling (in-stock at Radio Shack, the same battery is currently going for $20 before tax).
If there are indications that the eMac is running hot (like the monitor colors going funny), check the air intakes on the bottom of the front of the eMac and make sure they're clear of papers, cat hairs, and the like. If the rear vents look dusty, you can either disassemble the rear cover to wipe the vents and fan blades clear, or just use the quick solution of using canned air to blast the rear vents at about a 135 degree angle pointed away from the eMac, with the eMc on so that there's airflow pressure out of the chassis (to prevent dust from being blown back into the eMac's circuitry).

Changed access permissions now machine won't boot. Utilising deep breathing techniques until help appears.

Maybe a brain snap but I changed the access permissions on the hardrive to everyone-no access, what do I need to do. After 20 minutes of beachballing I pmowered down, and now it won't boot up, gets stuck on the apple boot up screen. There also exists in permissions another access setting admin-readwrite. Would appreciate some heads up on what I can do (trying not to panic).

See this User Tip by Niel: I accidentally set a disk's permissions to No Access ...
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-2240

Has Mavericks gone all maverick on my 2010, 27" iMac? Long story, short: Replaced 'bad' HD with identical model (1TB), reloaded apps, + got external 2TB HD. Fan was running high, now machine won't boot in ANY mode.

I have a mid-2010 iMac (27") 2.66 GHz Core i5 (750) with 4GB RAM that I bought second-hand almost three years ago. It worked perfectly...until I 'upgraded' to Mavericks last Fall, & all my trouble began. At first, certain apps started getting kinda wobbly, especially Chrome which was really unstable. Eventually one day on boot-up I got the gray screen/apple logo/spinning wheel/loading bar--and then it would shut down. I got apple care on the phone and we went through a laundry list of various tests and start-up attempts. We reset PRAM, got me into safe mode and eventually hit a point where we were going to have to wipe the HD and start fresh--except I didn't have a back-up (shame on me!). He told me 1) the error code that came up after running disk utitility (?) indicated no problem with HD and that it was software related; and, 2) to take it into Genius Bar, have them backup data and then I could call him back and we'd do the deed and then reinstall with backed-up files. Tried but Geniuses said, "We don't do that" and told my hubby how to. We bought the equipment and prepared to back-up using my son's MacBook Pro. No glory. Nada.
After much back-and-forth with 'geniuses' and guy on phone, we took it to MicroCenter. Their diagnostics said HD is shot--get new one. After pricing everything out we went with iFixit's instructions, and I ordered the identical (I thought) HD for Mac online from manufacturer. We installed it, but had wee problem with LCD temp sensor and so fan ran like crazy. I also bought a 2TB external back-up and did routine back-ups, so I should be good there. I am aware of that third rail on the HD's with sensor but thought I could circumvent that and 'knew' it was really the LCD sensor that was the problem. I was traveling for months all winter/spring so didn't have time to devote to a pesky fan noise. HOWEVER, with increased use being home for several weeks, suddenly we are back to square one it seems. One day the machine shut down and has not rebooted since--about three weeks ago now. Haven't called apple care but tried to reset PRAM and tried to restart using thumb drive where I thought I had saved a copy of Mavericks--didn't work so don't know for sure if it's on there. I opened machine back up and saw that LCD sensor wire was not connected and falling apart. I ordered a new wire which installed tonight with no apparent problems, crossed my fingers and...NADA. Same-o, same-o: gray screen, apple, spinning wheel, loading bar...then it shuts down and goes to black. I have tried to restart with all kinds of codes: reset PRAM, safe mode, hold down option key, hold down Command+R...again, nothing. I even replaced the keyboard batteries. As the progress bar fills up near the end, I hear a little click and whirr, fan running softly, but then it just shuts down. I should mention that the PRAM reset did actually start out like it was working--it shut down/restarted but then the daggone apple/gray scree/spinning wheel/progress bar would kick in again...and then shut down 5-10 minutes later. Any ideas, folks? Please help?

Your internal hard drive is not good.
Your Time Machine drive with your backups on it, if these backups were created using OS X Mavericks version of Time Machine, these will not be accessible by early OS X versions of Time Machine.
Plus, Time Machine stores data and nothing of the OS X system.
Plus, you want to save/retrieve your data that is still on your iMac's internal drive.
So, we can try to get your iMac back to running OS X 10.9 Mavericks.
The most easiest and direct way to do this is to just purchase another external 2 TB hard drive (preferably a fast FireWire 800 external hard drive)
You can use your OS X Snow Leopard install DVD to format this new hard drive as an OS X Extended Format with GUID partition scheme.
Create two partitions on the new external drive one that is big enough for OS X and all applications (say 500 Gbs) and the remaining partition for storage so you can manually copy all your important data ( and maybe your Applications folder, too) from your Mac's internal drive (if it is accessible) to the large partition on this new drive.
Once the drive is formatted using the Disk Utility app that is on your OS X Snow Leopard DVD disc, you can then proceed to install OS X Snow Leopard to this new external drive and now giving you a bootable hard drive that will have a fairly fast, working OS X version your iMac can boot to, now.
Once OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is install to this new external hard drive, you need to boot to this to get up and running.
Use OS X Software Update feature to get you back to OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard so you can regain use of The Mac App Store.
You have two options, now.
You still need to attempt to manually copy over all your important data and applications over to the large storage partition you created on this new external drive.
Once you have done this, you need to search for, purchase, download and install a data cloning app, like CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper to be able to clone your new hard drive's system back to your iMac's internal drive once you have resolved/replaced you iMac's Internal hard drive, again, if it is damaged.
If you still want to be able to access your Time Machine Backup drive, you can go ahead and try to re-download OS X 10.9 Mavericks ( you may need to use a Combo Update version from the Mac App Store, now as Mavericks is up to 10.9.5, now. You will upgrade install Mavericks over your new OS X Snow Leopard partition on the new external hard drive.
If, successful, you should be able to access your Time Machine backup at this point.
You will be running your iMac from this external drive until the internal drive is repaired/replaced.
The other idea is if you do not care about your Time Machine backups on the other drive, you can foresake the data on this drive and keep this new external drive , and your iMac, running OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard and forget about upgrading to Mavericks, at all, since you had so many issues with it.

Hard drive not accessible at boot time. Machine won´t boot into Windows.

Greetings,
I am trying to troubleshoot an HP Mini 110-1000 (actually a refurbished HP Mini 110-1033 CL PC).
When the machine boots, it attempts to connect to the network and the process hangs. I booted into BIOS to attempt changing the boot sequence to another device such as the hard disk or USB. None where found. Then, I tried to perform diagnostics on the hard drive. It was not found.
My guesses are:
1. The hard drive is disconnected
or
2. The hard drive is broken
or
3. All of the hardware devices are disconnected.
or
4. The mother board is broken.
I would appreciate some feedback before I start disassembling the machine. I would just go ahead, but the fact that
none ofthe input devices are seen at boot time makes me believe that this is a mother board problem.
In any case, a re-install of the OS is apparently in store, and I don´t have the original install disks...
Thank you for your help and feedback.
Regards,
Jean-Pierre

Hi,
Please use the following instructions to fix:
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c01443463&cc=ad&dlc=en&lc=en&jumpid=reg_r1002_in...
Good luck.
BH
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IMac G5 20". Disk died. Machine won't boot. Can't see replacement drive.

Machine was on, but frozen. I power cycled and it wouldn't boot. I removed the drive and put it in an external SATA case and was able to mount it on my MBP and copy 50GB of stuff off. I'll pick through it later. I got a new drive at Fry's and put it in. I popped in the Tiger install disk and ran Disk Utility. It didn't even show the internal drive. I ran System Profiler and the Serial ATA section said "No information available." Uh-oh. Is the interface fried? I bought the machine in March 2005 so it's not that old.
Thanks for any help,
Al

I have a replacement disk. Easy enough to install.
I checked again. I can't verify the other end of the drive cables. They disappear under the motherboard and I just don't want to tear the whole thing apart. I notice that many capacitors on the motherboard have bowed tops when they should be very flat.
While an external FW drive would probably work, the speed of the interface would be a limiting factor as the drive itself claims 1.5Gb/sec or 3Gb/sec. I wonder if that's just the drive, or the interface into the machine itself.
I checked the repair extension programs. These specific symptoms do not match the documented issues. The machine can boot a Tiger install DVD just fine. It's just the %&$&^* SATA interface itself.
Thanks for the suggestions,
Al

Updated T400 BIOS (Win XP Pro box). Now machine won't boot.

The laptop sounds like it tries to boot but doesn't show the Thinkpad splash screen and just hangs.
Please advise. Thanks.

Hi cstech,
Try this:-
1.) Unplug the power cord and the battery.
2.) Press the 'Power' Button 10 times repeatedly.
3.) Then hold the 'Power' Button down for 25 seconds.
4.) Put the battery back in and plug the power cord back in.
If it doesn't work then most certainly your thinkpad is dead. Try calling customer support if still under warranty.
Hope it helps.
Maliha (I don't work for lenovo)
ThinkPads:- T400[Win 7], T60[Win 7], IBM 240[Win XP]
IdeaPad: U350
Apple:- Macbook Air [Snow Leopard]
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Macbook Pro 15" won't boot from ANYTHING :( Can't mount internal drive

Hi there,
I'm new to these forums so please bear with me if I make a faux pas.
A few days ago while watching a movie on my MBP Intel Core 2 Duo 2.5 the beach ball of death appeared and the computer became unresponsive. I restarted to the flashing folder with a question mark.
Tried to boot from the install disk - No joy : Occasionally gets to the language selection screen (after a good 5-8 minute wait) and then instantly and completely freezes. Cursor won't move, caps lock light is unresponsive etc..
Tried to boot from Diskwarrior - Similar to the above. Long wait, boots to the Diskwarrior 'setting up' screen, unresponsive cursor - despite, Diskwarrior seemingly going through the motions (status in text changes, menu bar appears) and then it reports an unexpected error with code 60, 2105 and completely freezes.
Can't boot from a USB flash drive with a clean version of OS X made from my install disk.
Disk won't mount when in target disk mode. However the DVD drive mounts it's contents onto the host machine when it target mode.
I removed the drive last night and placed it in an external enclosure and OS X reports "The disk you've inserted is not recognised et.. "Initialise" "Ignore" "Eject". The drive appears in Disk Utility but all options are greyed out, SMART status says 'not supported' and it's capacity is shown as 0 bytes. The drive registers in the Hardware pane of Diskwarrior but no-where else.
I'm fine with the fact that the drive has failed but could these problems indicate something more serious? I'm concerned that the machine won't boot from any device or media. Is this a symptom of a failed hard drive or could this be a logic board issue?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated!!!!
Thanks all and Happy new Year.
XOXO

You might try a PRAM reset and see if this does any good.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379?viewlocale=en_US
It sounds like the hard drive itself is toast based on how it looks in an enclosure. So you won't be able to boot from it. Possibly after a PRAM reset you could option boot to a disc or to your external drive.
I had the experience of a failed hard drive totally messing up my PowerMacG4, and it took some doing to get it going again. I finally got it going again, and it has been working ever since without issue.
The MBP is a different machine, but having experienced first hand what a dying hard drive could do, I think it's well worth doing any resets you can.
If no joy, make an appointment at the genius bar and ask them if they can run a hardware test from their store feed. If you do have other issues, they should show up then.
If you end up being able to boot to the optical drive, you could try running the extended version of the Apple Hardware test yourself.
Good luck!

New to Mac - how to re-install when G4 won't boot from CD

Hi all
I am completely new to Mac, so bear with me here. I recently bought three G4's from my employer (they took over some old offices of a company that went bust and left all their equipment, which has been lying around for some years now). Wow, for a PC-guy like me it is quite a switch
Anyways, I managed to get one of the running and re-install with new OS (Panther) as I have the original discs.
However, one of them is causing me some problems. It is running OS X Server and has been setup with password - so when I boot up I get prompted to log on and can't get any further. It read a few places that it should be possible to boot from the install discs and then re-set the passwords. I tried holding down C when booting, but the machine won't boot from the CD. Tried holding C before powering on, before the chime, after the chime, when the logo displays, etc. Nothing helps. The key on the keyboard is working (tried it in the user-name box when I get prompted to log on)
I don't care about the conents of the drives - just want to re-install. But how to do that when the C-key isn't working to get it to boot from CD? Guess one of my problems could be that I don't have Mac keyboard and have to plug a Windows-keyboard into it. Also tried pressing the ALT key at boot up, but that does nothing either.
Help?

It is a server yes. But it doesn't matter though about the lock.
Here's what happened so far which also solved my problem:
- Moved around on the RAM sticks and then managed to boot into OF
- Reset security-mode as described in various forums and guides
- Still couldn't boot from CD - even after resetting PRAM and NVRAM.
- So I searched the net (sorry to my boss for not doing much work today) and when I came home I was armed with many useful hints to do the dance with the machine.
... but just before we stepped onto the dance floor, I noticed a post-it taped to the side of one of the OTHER machines (I bought three from my employer's storage sale and all three from the same company whose offices they took over). And on that post it was two words one of which was Administrator. It turned out that the other one was the password. Dough. So much ado about nothing. But, at least I learned a lot about the Mac-world along the way.
However, when I pop the CD in I cannot see it when I logged on - faulty device? in "ABout this Mac" is shows the DVD-drive just fine. Is it concivable that someone could have disabled it some way? If so, how do I enable it again?
Thanks everybody for all your patience with me

After 10.6 security update 2013-002 PGP encrypted disk won't boot

I ran the latest security update on my very old 17" intel MacBook Pro (It won't boot, so I can't give you the model number). It has PGP encryption installed on it, but I only have my passphrase, not the keys since it's a managed system. Half way through the install, it failed with a cryptic error, and the machine won't boot now. It gets half way through booting, and the screen goes black.
I have booted into single user mode, and ran fsck and applejack, only to get an error about a sibling error, and the hard disk is full.
Is this a PGP issue? Does the latest security update conflict with PGP?
I found this resolution to a similar sounding problem in 2010, but am unsure if this is happening now. Google searching hasn't yeilded anything so far.
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20101111120329585
Thanks for any help.
Melissa

About PGP I can't tell; the hint you linked (and the suggested fix) might still be valid:
PGP recommends folks to decrypt their drives first, update to 10.6.5 and then re-encrypt.
this sounds as a general recommendation.
However fsck reported a sibling error (an invalid link sibling error I presume) and that's not fine. Afaik, Disk Utility can't fix it; DiskWarrior hopefully will. I quote from Alsoft Support Database:
Question
Is DiskWarrior capable of repairing an "Invalid Sibling Link" error?
Answer
This is an error you definitely don't want. It indicates that parts of your directory, and therefore some of your files and folders, are inaccessible.
Mac OS Standard (HFS) and Mac OS Extended (HFS Plus) disk directories have a very complex structure. Each file or folder (item) on a disk has an entry in the disk's directory. These entries are in order of enclosing folder and then item name. This is similar to a yellow pages directory being ordered by type of business and then business name. Just like a yellow pages directory, the disk directory has pages except that its pages are called nodes. Unlike the yellow pages, nodes are dynamic and change as you add and delete items. It's sort of like a realtime yellow pages.
Imagine that the pages of the yellow pages are not in order and at the bottom of each page it says "Continued on page n," where n is the page that contains the next set of listings for the particular type of business that you're looking up. Well nodes are not arranged in order and each node has a reference, or link, to the next node that contains the next set of ordered items. This link is what is referred to as the sibling link.
A sibling link error is a bad link to another node. Either the link refers to the wrong node or it refers to an invalid node. As I said, a sibling link error makes some of your items inaccessible and can even prevent a disk from mounting. Sibling errors are notoriously difficult for some of the patching type of disk repair utilities to repair. Sometimes the repairs fail and the directory is damaged further. If a disk with a sibling link error is still mountable, I would advise backing up the accessible files and folders on the disk before attempting to repair it with that type of disk repair utility.
I'm not really sure DiskWarrior will work on a PGP encrypted disk. According to a few old Google matches, it should. See e.g.:
http://kb.mit.edu/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=4263350
but according to more recent ones, it won't:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2719460?start=0&tstart=0
It seems you're out of luck even with Safe Boot (from PGP Whole Disk Encryption Command Line User's Guide):
The Mac OS X Safe Boot feature does not work on a boot disk that has been whole disk encrypted; if you hold down the Shift key to enter Safe Boot, the system will fail to boot after authenticating at the PGP BootGuard screen.
So, while you're waiting for some more knowledgeable advice, you might backup your data to an external drive while booted in single user mode. There are many how-tos out there; I think this one is pretty clear:
http://jsalovaara.com/blog/backing-up-files-to-a-usb-drive-using-single-user-mod e.html
Hope this helps.

Early 2008 Macbook won't boot after 10.7.5 update?

Updated to 10.7.5, when it rebooted to do the install, there was an error message, and now the machine won't boot. Stuck on grey screen with spinning wheel.... reset PRAM, Disk utility says drive is OK... still no luck. ??
Looks like this has hit the news. Any update from Apple? I would take it to the apple store, but there's a mob becuase of the new iPhone, so..... yea.
Apple, please fix this. And bring back Google Maps to IOS while you're at it.

Updated to 10.7.5, when it rebooted to do the install, there was an error message, and now the machine won't boot. Stuck on grey screen with spinning wheel.... reset PRAM, Disk utility says drive is OK... still no luck. ??
Looks like this has hit the news. Any update from Apple? I would take it to the apple store, but there's a mob becuase of the new iPhone, so..... yea.
Apple, please fix this. And bring back Google Maps to IOS while you're at it.

Macbook Pro 2010 froze, now won't boot.

Hey all,
I have a Macbook Pro that i got in 2010. It has been a great machine. I have done a couple of upgrades on the ram and hard drive. For a while there were not any problems. But last week my computer froze up, app by app, till the whole computer was unusable. Then I restarted the computer and it said that the hard drive was having problems. I tried doing all the repairs on the hard drive, eventually replacing it with a SSD because I thought the drive was dead. So I plugged in the SSD and it had a hard time writing to it the first time I booted the computer with internet recovery, but when I tried it again it allowed me to install OS X Mountain Lion again. Got it installed, then the exact same thing happened to me, each app froze, till the whole computer froze, now the machine won't boot, or even let me do any of the keyboard boot options. It just sits at a blank screen and gets hot. Any ideas? I really need my computer to be working right now and i don't have the money for an additional one.
Thanks

Yes, unfortunately, yet another Apple device failure. Question marked answered because repaired under warranty. BUT:
It is embarrassing as a Mac bigot to have had this problem and in the few months since ALSO had:
- iMac 24" (condensation inside screen, never happened to any other company's monitors)
- iPhone 3GS white screen of death
and before this:
- MacBook Pro 17" defective graphics, motherboard replaced
- PowerBook G4 17" defective sound system, motherboard replaced
- eMac G4 700, screen fizzled into showing 1/4 display size in center, thrown away
- PowerBook G3 500 FW defective, whole machine replaced
- PowerBook G3 300 defective, machine replaced
- PowerBook Duo 280c defective keyboard, replaced
and I can't even remember past that.
Can't make fun of ugly clunky Dells or HPs anymore after this experience.
Imran

MacPro3,1 won´t boot Linux Live CD´s

Hello,
I´m the proud owner of a MacPro 3,1, 14GB Ram, 2 x Quad-Core Intel Xeon 2,8 GHz CPU, NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT. Boot-ROM-Version is MP31.006C.B05.
For my business it is required to work with Linux, too - and I want to use the full capacity of my machine - thats why I won´t use VMWare Fusion or something like that.
To check whether Linux is running well on my machine, I downloaded different Live-CDs (ISOs) and burned them with Toast 9. They work well with my MacBook Pro - but unfortunately, my MacPro does not boot any! of these CD´s. I tried Ubuntu 8.04, 8.10, Knoppix, OpenSUSE 11.1, Gentoo minimum installer CD , Mandrive 10 - all in 32 and 64 bit (thanks for the speedy internet connection).
I boot the mac with holding down the "alt" (option) key and selet the Linux CD - and: nothing happens. the machine completely freezes.
I also tried to put the cd into the MacBook and started it with "t" - then I connected my MacPro and restarted him. He found the LinuxCd in the MacBook - selecting it: same situation. Machine freezes. Without any hint, message or whatever.
The freeze happens before the gray MacScreen should switch to the black and very first sceen of the Linux CD.
I really tried everything... Installed a bootmanager (reFIT). Same issue. I can select the cd (it is seen as a Linux CD) and with hitting "enter": freeze!
Then I installed a different DVD drive into my machine. Same issue. I burned a cd very slowly - same issue.
I put out all my RAM except 2 x 1. Same situation. I contacted certain Linux forums - no clue.
Does anybody know, why my machine won´t boot the CD´s? Does anybody know, whether my Mac supports Linux???
Many thanks!!
Stefan

Exacatly for what you like to do, a Mac isn´t built. The lesson I´ve learned from switching to Mac OS X (Windows and Linux before) is quite simple: Don´t get too much into details and follow the white rabbit.
I´m used to work with a terminal session under linux and configure everything manually, if required. With Windows I have shares for my MP3, my images, office, project and so on on a seperate network drive to be able to back everything up manually.
I had to learn to trust the Apple Thing - using their browser, iTunes, iPhoto and so on. And storing everything without thinking about ist. Doing backup with Time Machine and just enjoying the system. Following the white rabbit...
It´s hard for me simply being a user
Ubuntu is really satisfying stuff - have a close look on it and you will like it! And - if you have any question during or for the setup and use, feel free to get on touch with me.
Regards
Stefan

Machine won't boot

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