Q: MacBook Pro boots directly into Recovery HD after update. Disk Utility could not repair the disk. OS problem or hard drive problem?
I wanted to update a non-retina MacBook Pro (mid-2012) with OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.5) and a hard drive that I had not used in a while to OS X El Capitan. Everything was working until I decided to update the MacBook Pro with the latest Mountain Lion security update that was available (Security Update 2015-006). My MacBook Pro first restarted to my desktop with various dialogs that said "Finder quit unexpectedly." I then decided to restart the MacBook Pro. However, a circle with a slash symbol started flashing where the Apple logo should be (as described in this Apple support article). Then my MacBook Pro booted directly into Recovery HD. I then ran "verify disk" in Disk Utility and reported a ton of "Missing Thread Record" errors and "Overlapped extent allocation" errors. I counted at least 25 instances of each error. There were other errors too, but not as many as the two I mentioned. I then ran "repair disk" and Disk Utility could not repair the disk. I also tried to put an external hard drive with a bootable clone of my other MacBook Pro running OS X Yosemite and the drive was not recognized.
Right now I'm not sure whether this is just an operating system problem or a hard drive problem. I'm also not sure whether to just do a clean install of OS X Mountain Lion then install OS X El Capitan, or to run a utility like DiskWarrior or TechTool Pro, or to just simply get as much data as I can from the hard drive and replace it.
MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.5)
Posted on Aug 5, 2016 5:56 PM
The problem is with the drive. Copy off as much data as you can, and then either use a utility to repair the disk, or reformat it, or replace it as needed.
(143861)
Posted on Aug 5, 2016 6:01 PM