MacBook won't boot - Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit
My wife's new MacBook won't start up. It crashed earlier today and when she tried to restart it, it got as far as the gray Apple logo and the spinning gear and then it reboots again. I booted it with the Leopard install disc and two strange things happened.
1. When the installer first opens, it gives me an error that says I cannot install Mac OS X on this computer. This is a 3 month old MacBook that shipped with Leopard, but it's telling me that OS X can't be installed.
2. When I run verify or repair permissions with Disk Utility from the Leopard disc, I almost immediately get an error stating "The underlying task reported failure on exit". When I try to verify or repair the disk, it says everything is fine.
The HD appears to be fine. I can access it from Firewire Target Disk Mode and everything is still there. I can also boot into Single User Mode, but not Safe Mode.
The night before the crash I made a change to the HD permissions via "Get Info". I copied the "Read/Write" settings to all enclosed folders because it was telling me that it couldn't install Flashplayer because I didn't have sufficient permission, even though she has an Admin account. After the change, Flashplayer installed just fine and everything was OK until this afternoon when she had a kernel panic while iChatting. iChat was the only program open at the time. She rebooted and hasn't gotten past the gray Apple logo since. I read in some other threads about people having the same issue after accidently setting HD permissions to "none". One suggestion was to use Firewire Target Disk Mode to open the drive with another computer and change the permissions back. I tried that, and the drive opened just fine, as I mentioned, but the permissions didn't appear to be set in a way that would cause problems. I set all of them to read/write and applied them to all enclosed folders just to be sure, but nothing changed when I rebooted.
Any other suggestions will be much appreciated. Thanks!
1. When the installer first opens, it gives me an error that says I cannot install Mac OS X on this computer. This is a 3 month old MacBook that shipped with Leopard, but it's telling me that OS X can't be installed.
2. When I run verify or repair permissions with Disk Utility from the Leopard disc, I almost immediately get an error stating "The underlying task reported failure on exit". When I try to verify or repair the disk, it says everything is fine.
The HD appears to be fine. I can access it from Firewire Target Disk Mode and everything is still there. I can also boot into Single User Mode, but not Safe Mode.
The night before the crash I made a change to the HD permissions via "Get Info". I copied the "Read/Write" settings to all enclosed folders because it was telling me that it couldn't install Flashplayer because I didn't have sufficient permission, even though she has an Admin account. After the change, Flashplayer installed just fine and everything was OK until this afternoon when she had a kernel panic while iChatting. iChat was the only program open at the time. She rebooted and hasn't gotten past the gray Apple logo since. I read in some other threads about people having the same issue after accidently setting HD permissions to "none". One suggestion was to use Firewire Target Disk Mode to open the drive with another computer and change the permissions back. I tried that, and the drive opened just fine, as I mentioned, but the permissions didn't appear to be set in a way that would cause problems. I set all of them to read/write and applied them to all enclosed folders just to be sure, but nothing changed when I rebooted.
Any other suggestions will be much appreciated. Thanks!
2.4ghz MacBook Pro, Dual 2.5ghz G5 Power Mac, 667mhz TiBook, Mac OS X (10.5.2)
