Hello. Thanks for replying. Not sure what you mean by "colloquial phrases"? I am NOT tech-savvy at all. I went online and followed a process recommended.
Anyway, when I turn on my computer, the screen is all white. Then the Apple icon appears, as does the progress bar. The progress bar begins to advance to the right and takes 20 minutes to reach the end! Once it's there, it does nothing for several minutes. Eventually, a message appears saying something like the computer has to restart due to a problem, and then the whole process starts all over again. And again. Without me doing anything. Until I just shut it down.
I then followed the steps to try to find and repair whatever the problem was. It involved selecting "first aid" when checking disks/volumes. When doing so, 1 volume (Macintosh HD) in Container Disk 2 resulted in the following:
first aid process has failed
error:(oid 0x28a441) om:btn:dev_read_finish(2663489, 1):Input/output error
object map is invalid
The volume /dev/rdisk2s5 could not be verified completely
file system check exit code is 8
Restoring the original state found as mounted
file system verify or repair failed. :(-69845)
I hope all that helps.
Thanks!