Need Help! Macbook won't boot

[goodfella44]

This macbook won't boot past the inital gray apple logo, and spinning circle screen. It just sits there. So I researched for a possible solution, but still having problems.

First off I'm not too familiar with macs so please be patient. I'm trying to boot a copy of a mac osx dmg file from an external drive. I already converted the drive/partition to GUID, and formatted to esf+ but when I hold down the option key when I hear the chime sound all that shows up is the macintosh hd. The drive I have connected isn't available to select. I cannot boot from disk because the disk drive is inoperable. Please help!

 

[umrigar]

hold Shift key for safe boot?

try single user mode (CMD S at boot) then fsck -fy?

 

[goodfella44]

Thanks for the reply umrigar. So I'm unable to boot into safe mode. Nothing happens. When I go the command prompt and input fsck -fy it shows it's rebuilding catalog B-tree, and then says The volume Macintosh HD could not be repaired *** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED ***

I think my optical drive is functioning so I'm going to try and get a copy of the os in dmg, and burn to a dual layer dvd. Is there anything special I have to do in order to burn on a windows machine that would be able to boot on a mac? I've read where some people converted the .dmg to an .iso in order to burn in windows. Will it not work if I kept it in .dmg form?

Also I've been restarting and shutting down the macbook using just the power key. Is this good? Is there any other way to do so that may be better than that?

Thanks ahead for anyone who can help me with this. I really appreciate it!

 

[TheStu]

Thanks for the reply umrigar. So I'm unable to boot into safe mode. Nothing happens. When I go the command prompt and input fsck -fy it shows it's rebuilding catalog B-tree, and then says The volume Macintosh HD could not be repaired *** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED ***

I think my optical drive is functioning so I'm going to try and get a copy of the os in dmg, and burn to a dual layer dvd. Is there anything special I have to do in order to burn on a windows machine that would be able to boot on a mac? I've read where some people converted the .dmg to an .iso in order to burn in windows. Will it not work if I kept it in .dmg form?

Also I've been restarting and shutting down the macbook using just the power key. Is this good? Is there any other way to do so that may be better than that?

Thanks ahead for anyone who can help me with this. I really appreciate it!

How did the DMG end up on the external in the first place? You can't just drop the file on there (think of it as an ISO, you can't put disk.iso onto a flash drive and have it boot). You have to restore the DMG to the flash drive, and that requires another Mac.