Really Weird Issues with Macbook Pro *updated*

[FearoftheNight]

My mac has been behaving oddly recently.
1. Long load times where it alternates between a blue screen w/ a cursor and dark blue screen w/ no cursor. Sometimes it will load into osx after a few minutes sometimes it will force me to turn the system off and on again.
2. Excessive beach balls.
3. The computer will hardlock after it beach balls occasionally.
4. Hard drive making a lot of noise.

I rain chkdsk in windows xp and disk doctor's verify in osx and they both said the hdd was fine. Any idea as to what could be causing this?

Update: I just tried opening up vlc to update it when the spinning beach ball hard locked and forced me to restart. Upon restarted the galaxy background of leopard is present with a login screen, usually I'm taken straight into the os. It recognized when I input a bad pw but when I input the correct pw it takes me to a light blue screen for a few moments then takes me back to the login screen. I'm typing this on the bootcamp win xp partition now.

 

[Tyranicus]

Boot into single user mode (hold Command+S while booting), and run the following command "fsck -fy". If that doesn't solve your problem, you should look into DiskWarrior.

 

[FearoftheNight]

No go with that command. Can you tell if its a hardware or software issue?

 

[TheStu]

Originally posted by: FearoftheNight
No go with that command. Can you tell if its a hardware or software issue?

Well, it certainly sounds like a bum hard drive, but if both checks came back ok...

Have you installed anything recently that might be causing the problem? This includes updates to your software on the OS X side.

Is XP exhibiting any problems at all?

 

[FearoftheNight]

xp is working fine aside from the hdd subjectively seeming a bit louder than usual. do i have to time machine it up? cause if its a hdd wouldn't be bad to have an excuse to upgrade this 120 gig to a 320...

 

[Tyranicus]

This has happened to me a few times on my MBP. it could just be that your partition got hosed. The fact that it boots into Windows supports this theory. That's why I recommend DiskWarrior. It's worked well for me in the past.

 

[FearoftheNight]

can diskwarrior still salvage my partition? how would i go about doing it?

 

[TheStu]

Originally posted by: FearoftheNight
can diskwarrior still salvage my partition? how would i go about doing it?

You need to have diskwarrior be run from another Mac so that it can access the partition. So the best way to do it would be to either boot your mac in target disk mode, or remove the drive and put it into an enclosure.