Mac froze and keeps shutting down upon start up

[Marla]

My boyfriend has a project due tomorrow. He was using After Effects and saved and got the pinwheel. Then it completely froze except for the pinwheel. He let it sit for an hour and nothing changed. Then he closed the screen and opened it back up and when he was prompted for password, the whole thing froze.

He left it for half an hour, no change, so he did a force shut down.

Now when we try to start it up, we get the gear and a progress bar and it shuts itself off. I can't get it into safe mode or anything. I have no idea what to do. This was months of work he put into it. MONTHS and its due tomorrow. Does anyone know what we can do?

 

[oldscribe]

Hi and welcome,


Try starting in safe mode again as soon as you hear the tone and not before, press the shift key, release the key only when you see the Apple logo, this also forces a check of the startup volume.

If no success boot from install disk.