My White Macbook is stuck at the loading screen, and disk utility, safe mode doesn't work either. What should I do?

Reinstalling Lion Without the Installer

Boot to the Recovery HD: Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alterhatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.

Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions: Upon startup select Disk Utility from the main menu. Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions as follows.

When the recovery menu appears select Disk Utility. After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list. In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive. If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the main menu.

Reinstall Lion: Select Reinstall Lion and click on the Continue button.

Note: You can also re-download the Lion installer by opening the App Store application. Hold down the OPTION key and click on the Purchases icon in the toolbar. You should now see an active Install button to the right of your Lion purchase entry. There are situations in which this will not work. For example, if you are already booted into the Lion you originally purchased with your Apple ID or if an instance of the Lion installer is located anywhere on your computer.

FIRST, I suggest you get hold of another machine and backup your files by using "T"arget mode to launch, then connecting the two machines via a Firewire or USB cable. The work on your machine sounds too important for you to risk it surviving Recovery.

Target mode should turn your MB into the equivalent of and external hard drive as seen by other machines. Have not tried that lately with Windows, but it should mount.

nfan12 wrote:

How do you activate Target Mode?

Hold down the T-key as you startup.

BTW, just adding to answer your earlier question:

At some point you have to have an operating system involved. I've seen where stevesmacfix's YouTube video had installed Lion on a large thumb drive and used the Option Key to mount from there, BUT he used SuperDuper! to get the Lion OS on the thumbdrive first. Lion's installESD.dmg may not let to do a full install to a thumbdrive. Might be worth trying if you have the time. He used a 16GB thumbdrive (if I recall).

Only if can boot the computer. If you cannot boot the computer, then you can only hope to access the hard drive via Target Disk Mode - Transferring files between two computers using FireWire. This requires two Macs both of which must have Firewire ports.

Actually, you can simply clone InstallESD.dmg to any freshly formatted USB flash drive of 8 GBs or greater capacity. The cloning can easily be done with Disk Utility. No need for SuperDuper! or any third-party software.

You are right Kappy. Steve (stevesmacfix) cloned a full installation on to a thumbdrive, not just the installESD.dmg installer. So, the suggestion in this case is to have an emergency machine on thumbdrive to work from.

I know it is a wild thought, but working while traveling, and having emergency options is something I can see the value in. For instance, having Lion installed (I mean completely installed) on a third partition, might be handy to have in this kind of instance.

No. TDM only works on Firewire. Most computer stores should have Firewire to Firewire cables. Be sure to get the correct one. There's FW400 to FW400, FW800 to FW800, and FW400 to FW800. You will need the cable that can be connected to both computers.

Kappy wrote:

Actually, you can simply clone InstallESD.dmg to any freshly formatted USB flash drive of 8 GBs or greater capacity. The cloning can easily be done with Disk Utility. No need for SuperDuper! or any third-party software.

GUID formatted, I'll add. A lot of off the shelf thumbdrives are FAT32 and would not work. Just sayin'.

Quite true. My solution is only useful for installing Lion. Putting a full Lion system onto a 16 GB flash drive provides a bootable system. And, there is enough space left over to copy the InstallESD.dmg file and some useful utilities to the flash drive.

I have both with me when I travel (well, it was Snow Leopard, but now it will be Lion.) I use these little flash sticks that about the size of a small piece of gum. Put them on a keychain, and you have them with you always.

Chris,

Thanks for adding.