Frozen MacBook

a flashing question mark appears when you start your mac

Mac OS X: grey screen appears during startup

can you hold option key down while booting and by doing so be able to choose the startup disk you want to boot from ? please let me know if this works

Mine did the same thing and unfortunately it had crashed. I lost everything on my hard drive. I did have the time machine and I could only retrieve from pre 2008.

OK...my Macbook5,1 started doing this about 2 days ago. Was playing a game and it froze. Had to do a hard reset and was fine. Yesterday it froze 3 times when I was doing normal tasks, twice I got the warning on the screen to "You must restart your computer, hold the power button". It happened once when I was playing World of Warcraft and once just a little while ago when I was browsing web (firefox) and using itunes. Not sure what's going on.

this could be a sign of the hard drive failing or having a problem - can you launch the disk utility under applications - utilities - disk utility and then select your disk in the left hand pane and under the first aid option select verify disk and let me know if it says or reports anything wrong

any chance you have a friend or relative that has a mac ? If so you could put your mac into target mode by holding down "T" while turning it on and wait for the firewire symbol to appear - then connect it to the friends mac - it should then show up as a hard drive on their mac - and you could then launch the disk utility on their mac and have it review your disk to see if it detects any errors on the hard drive - you could also have it repair premissions for good measure - then hopefully after all is done - eject the disk that represents your computers hard drive - then power it down wait a min and power on to see if it will boot properly - let me know - otherwise - if it will not boot to safe mode - your going to have to swing by local apple store or authorized repair center ( preferably the apple store ) to get them to help you since you dont have the disk that came with the system -

Side thought - if any of your friends have a full ( not the type that come with the mac ) but the dics you buy form the store of any OS like Leopard/ Snow Leopard / etc... - if anyone arond you has one - you can insert it and hold down the C key to see if it will boot to the disc - and if it does then you can access the disk utility and do what I mentioned above - and then set teh startup disk and have it restart to your intenal hard drive - I hope you can get it working - please let me know

do the steps you already did until you get to the OS instal window - then look up at the top of the screen - you will see Utilities up there - select it - choose disk utility and run repair disk and then repair permissions on your hard drive - - it should see the hard drive once you go into the disk utlity - please let me know if that helps - after it repairs it for both methods - for permissions and disk - then go back under the utilities drop down where you found disk utility and choose the select start up disk - option - it should then show you your choices of start up disk and select your hard drive and it should restart to it - and finally get you back going - this should work as long as it can repair your hard drive - then I would save any data to an external hard drive that you need to salvage or clone the hard drive to an external hard drive - using carbon copy cloner - its a free download - then id recommend getting a new hard drive to replace your current one - it sounds like its going out on you - how long have you had that hard drive running in that mac ?