My mac will start up but wont load the login screen.

[phantasmagoriaxx]

I have a mac os x on tiger and I'm having problems a few days ago it was working fine and i did a system update for like the new itunes and stuff and it told me to restart my computer but i waited a few minuets to Finnish putting songs on my itunes then when i was done i pressed restart but then it was taking forever so i just pressed the of button until it turned of and when it did i turned it back on and it turned on but only go as far at the point where it has the apple sign and a little circle to show its loading and when it didn't get to the login screen after 10 mins i turned it of and on again and did this about 3 times then just left it to load for like an hour when this didn't work i left it off for the whole night and tried again the next day but it didn't work again so i left it on for the whole night and it still didn't work. I looked in the manual and nothing worked and the only thing i haven't tried it to erase and install tiger again because i don't want to loose over 15 000 songs. also i only have 5 GBs of space left on it so i couldn't re install the system and make everything go into a previous system folder because i need 15 GBs of free space for that.

I'm not sure if this is relavent but for about a week before my mac started doing this i was downloading torrents non stop and not turning of my mac so it can download over night.

if anyone can help PLEASE do because i miss my mac very much and i have some work i need it finish on it.

 

[Walrus666]

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107393

 

[EvilDonut]

This same exact thing just happened to me. Except I haven't been doing any torrents. I tried Safe Mode to effect. The Apple guy said to boot in the installation cd and do it again. But he said there was a possibility of losing all my information, which isn't good. Is it a good idea to do run it again?

 

[djkidblast]

I had the same problem after dropping my ibook. I had to do an install and now i cant get my files from the 'previous system' folder. Anybody know how to do this? Thanks