MacBook hanged and won't start up now!
Hi I need some help desperately as I'm in my last semester and I need to get things done on this 4 year old machine – bought in late 2008, it was the very first aluminum unibody MacBook (not MacBook Pro), its running Lion OS now.
So what happened was that: like any other ordinary day, I was running iTunes, have about 4 Safari pages on, Pages with about 3 documents and was chatting on Skype as well. So all of sudden, the music stopped and everything slowed down, almost hanging. There was the 'rainbow' wheel of course, and music came back on, and stopped again. So I force quitted iTunes. And 5-10mins later after trying to let it sort itself out, I force shut down the entire machine.
I turned the MacBook back on, allow it to do its thing, and it prompted me to reformat, basically the page where you could choose to reformat, repair and stuff like that. I didn't know what problem it was at first, so I choose to restart again, in hope to get in again normally by typing my password. But I was wrong.
My case seems to be the most similar to this one here in terms of how it happened:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3730738?start=0&tstart=0
Right now I can't get pass that prohibitory sign even though I tried to press 'shift' to get into safe mode, seems like it was running so slowly that it did not register my effort there for about 5minutes, so this already happened the second time. And it's been so slow that it took 25mins to change from the apple logo to the prohibitory sign.
Please help me! I need my data inside, is it possible to just repair or reinstall snow leopard but have all my data untouched?
MacBook, Mac OS X (10.7.3)