Macbook startup hang up help

[char]

My 13 in macbook is hanging up at the grey screen start-up and giving me the "chime" over and over and over. I started the computer up the other day, saw it get to the desktop and walked away and came back and it was like it had reset and was back to the grey screen endlessly "chiming."

Any thoughts on this or point me to a better forum to find an answer?
Thanks!

[anotherVTskibum]

You can try cmd-V just before the chime (press and hold until after the chime) for verbose mode or cmd-S for single user mode; I don't know if either will be sufficient to solve your problem, though.

Macosxhints, the Apple support discussion boards, and a few other Mac sites that I can't recall at the moment have all been helpful to me in the past when troubleshooting Mac issues.

[XtrPickels]

Boot from the startup disk and go to disk utilities. Run the check to see if you need to repair the drive.

[RShea]

Get a PC!

First thing to do is run some basic diagnostics- memory, hard drive test, see if it boots from the CD instead, etc.

[char]

Mac forums results in case anyone else runs across this problem...

http://discussions.apple.com/thread....44244&tstart=0

[Wasatch_Expat]

Did you end up replacing the HDD? My mac mini did this a few months ago, and we ended up replacing the hard drive. They gave us all the labor for free to transfer the files and do a recovery because I also walked out with a new macbook that was not part of the original plan. Love the macbook, but as always happens when buying apple products, two weeks after I bought it, they announced the new macbooks w/alu case and glass screen. Doh!

[Kirby]

Not sure I can be of any help, but it sounds a lot like how my mac was acting this summer. I ended up having to get the hard drive replaced - it was under warranty - and, unfortunately, I lost everything that wasn't backed up.

I really dig my mac, but they certainly aren't perfect.

[CNYFF]

mine just did the same thing the other day, by the sounds of this post, and the post on the mac forum....i get to look forward to losing all my files, and pictures