Chosen Solution
My MacBook has been working great for the last four years until last week. It froze, I did a manual restart and the cdrom initial spin sounded like a skipping record. The computer would not start until after a couple attempts at a manual reboot. after a successful restart computer sent an error log to Apple and ran fine for an hour maybe before the gray box telling me to restart appeared. I’ve booted from the installation CD multiple times and repaired the hard drive. After which I will get a successful reboot and run for a while before it restarts automatically, or requests a reboot in 5 languages. At the moment a successful startup is a luck of the draw unless Its immediately following a disk utility repair, and random, unsolicited black screens, restarts, or freezes are just a matter of time. my next attempt at a solution will be to backup then erase the drive before reinstalling the OS from scratch, but I’m wondering is this a hardware problem or a software one? Thanks for your answers
It could be either. Wiping the hard drive and starting with a fresh install of the OS as you’ve mentioned is the right step, and that will tell you the answer to your question. If you haven’t already, you might want to reset the PRAM and PMU/SMC before wiping the drive, just to see if that by chance helps the situation. Another test you can try is to connect your machine to another Mac via a firewire cable, then boot that machine in target mode, and boot your laptop in option mode, and see how well your machine works when it’s running off of the remote machine’s hard drive. If it works flawlessly, that points to a software issue on your laptop, and if it still crashes, that points to your machine having a hardware problem.
