Chosen Solution
MacBook Pro 15" will boot with chimes. Blue screen but no icons, no mouse pointer. Just a blue screen. However, I can boot to Safe Mode with all icons and mouse pointer. I have done a disk check and a verify permissions check. Nothing really major in the logs. I tried to boot from DVD, but the drive just spits it out. I will replace the DVD drive. But I’m not able to boot it even with the DVD unplugged. Any ideas? Update Found that the issue was two fold: The new cd drive helped the machine boot properly. I was able to reinstall the OS. Also, it turns out the FireWire port is bad. I did a little search on the intertubes and found that this can be overcome by moving the .kext files out of the Extensions folder. Because this machine is going to be used by my niece and she would have no reason to use FireWire, I went ahead and moved all IOFireWire related .kext files out and the machine is now functioning properly. The only issue I noticed was a problem with a little bit of a “stutter” in the OS behavior. When opening safari, the machine will hang slightly. I’ve watched for the logs, but find nothing related. I might have fixed it with the upgrade to 10.6.4…
The fact that it books fine in safe mode probably means it’s a software issue. You mentioned you tried to boot from DVD…is this the original restore DVD? If not, I’d try to boot from that, and do a reinstall without wiping the drive. If your optical drive is non-functional, you can put the DVD in another Mac, put that Mac in target mode, and connect it to your laptop via Firewire cable. Then boot your laptop in option mode by powering on holding down the option key, and select the restore DVD to boot from it. Actually, before you bother with that scenario, try booting up in option mode, and see if the restore DVD shows up as a bootable option. Select it, and see if it works.
