Black screen with pointer upon boot up (help)

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Black screen with pointer upon boot up (help)

Hello my macbook (13inch) unibody seems to take a long time (about 5 minutes) to reboot (on the white page with the loading icon and apple logo) until i reach a black screen (a bit of a blue tint) with only the pointer in it. The pointer can move around and i can adjust the brightness of keypad or screen (but it takes about a minute from the pressing of button until it takes effect). The last thing that happen before this was i that i was running parallels which froze, causing me to do a hard reboot (with the reboot button), and then before i knew it the problem had began. I tried using safe reboot but it does not work. Any solutions guys?
Thanks,
- Jeff

Macbook Unibody 13 inch, Mac OS X (10.6.3)

Posted on Apr 5, 2010 1:55 AM

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Answer 1

Apr 5, 2010 6:58 AM in response to pangjepangje

I've seen this issue once immediately after installing 10.6.3; I've also seen it a couple times before. I'd like to know a cause/solution too.

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Answer 2

pangjepangje Author

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Apr 5, 2010 10:29 PM in response to musicwind95

This time my macbook stops halfway through bootup (the gray screen with a progress bar at the bottom of the screen, like its updating), I then booted from my mac osx disk and through disk utility i immediately verified my startup disk and found that there was an error (the infamous invalid node structure), i recommend u boot from osx disk aswell and using disk utility, check your start up disk.

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Answer 3

jas88

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Apr 6, 2010 12:46 AM in response to musicwind95

I have the same problem with my Mac Mini: most of the time, connecting in via Screen Sharing just gives me a black screen with a mouse pointer and nothing else. I can SSH in fine, and if I reboot I do get the login screen as normal - but when I log in, Screen Sharing gets disconnected, and when I reconnect the screen is black again.

I've seen this problem on both my MBPs as well, but only when I (try to) resume from sleep. For a while I avoided sleep entirely, shutting the MBP off any time I moved it, but they haven't been so bad lately.

It's certainly infuriating, but having had this issue intermittently on Core Duo and Core 2 Duo MBPs and now consistently on a Mac Mini, across both Leopard and Snow Leopard, a fix seems unlikely now.

Does anyone know a way of getting single user mode over SSH? (The Mini is headless, so getting it a keyboard, mouse and display just to run fsck would be a pain...)

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