New user

[Lesley B]

Help anyone out there. Just opened my MacBook pro to find the rainbow wheel spinning incessantly and can't do a thing. There are about 6 programmes open. Wouldn't have thought that was excessive??

 

[honestone]

Help anyone out there. Just opened my MacBook pro to find the rainbow wheel spinning incessantly and can't do a thing. There are about 6 programmes open. Wouldn't have thought that was excessive??

Hi Lesley,

Welcome to the board. This is a good place to "hang out", and a number of folks are always willing to give a helping hand.

For your issue, could you let us know 1) what OS you are using, and 2) the exact model of your MacBook Pro? Additionally, had your MacBook Pro been running anything prior to you opening it (or "re-open it", that is, it was asleep, and you wanted to wake it up), or did you just boot it up after it had been shut down?

Maybe the first thing to try is to boot your machine into Safe Mode. Here is a link that tells you how to do that:

http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201262


Note that one of the things it does is to prevent some software from automatically loading or opening. Not sure if that part helps you, but you stated that you have a number of programs open. Be curious to know if you had them opened, and then shut down your machine without quitting any of those programs.

If you have any type of bootable backup on an external drive, you could boot the machine from that and use whatever tools you have on that external drive to trouble shoot your issue. If you don't, and are using anything later than Snow Leopard (OS 10.6.8), you could "boot" to the Recovery HD Partition (assuming it was created; it is usually invisible, but there is a way of making it visible, at least in Disk Utility and other disk maintenance/repair programs like Disk Warrior and TechTool Pro), and from there use Disk Utility to trouble shoot the hard drive inside your machine. This link explains how to boot to that partition:

[URL]http://osxdaily.com/2012/02/03/how-to-boot-into-os-x-lions-recovery-hd-partition/[/URL]

[URL='http://osxdaily.com/2012/02/03/how-to-boot-into-os-x-lions-recovery-hd-partition/']If you are using Snow Leopard (OS 10.6.8; seems to be what quite a few folks on this board use, although some of us use Mavericks, and like myself, Yosemite) or anything less, then you might try resetting the PRAM/NVRAM, and the SMC. This link explains how to do that:

[URL]http://www.macworld.com/article/2881177/how-to-reset-your-macs-nvram-pram-and-smc.html

In the future (assuming you are not doing this down), I strongly recommend that 1) you get an external drive, and 2) use the excellent backup/cloning program SuperDuper! in "free" mode. It is a life saver, and it creates a bootable backup of your system. I can tell you from first hand experience that it has saved my "bacon" at least twice! You can get that excellent program from here:

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/13803/superduper

Don't worry about the price (unless you want to buy it. I eventually did). You just click the download link to use the "demo" version, but that "demo" version never expires.

Finally, here are the various keyboard combinations you can use for your Mac:

http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201255[/URL][/URL]