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KarmaKazcade Author

Level 1

4 points

MacBook won't start up

Apologies for the long message, I'm really struggling to sort out my MacBook and any help would be greatly appreciated.

The other day my MacBook suddenly slowed right down and when I switched it on again later, it started to load and then switched off again. This is as far as it will go now.

I'm really not tech savvy and have looked all over for help and tried a few different things without success.

I can get into recovery mode and have tried to Reinstall Mac OS but get a message saying:

The operation could't be completed.

Permission denied.

Why is that and is it possible to fix?

I have looked into making a bootable installer but have struggled to even be able to download HighSierra at all let alone it being an app in the Applications folder to then turn into the bootable installer.

I have done First Aid but when I get to Macintosh HD it fails, getting stuck at Checking catalog file before failing. When I check the details it says :

The volume Macintosh HD could not be verified completely.

File system check exit code 8.

Restoring the original state found as unmounted.

Problem -69842 occurred while restoring the original mount state.

File system verify or repair failed. :(-69845)

Operation failed...

What do these problems mean and can I fix them?

I have no back ups of most of the stuff on my MacBook and have seen that you can transfer files between Macs using target disk mode. I'm borrowing someone else's Mac to try resolve my ones issues and I don't want to muck up theirs as well.

If my MacBook's meltdown is due to a virus, will this get transferred to the other laptop as well when I transfer everything else?

Thanks in advance for any advise in fixing this.

MacBook Pro

Posted on Jul 3, 2021 5:03 PM

Top-ranking reply

BDAqua

Level 10

245,285 points

Posted on Jul 3, 2021 5:24 PM

It sounds like you’re disk has got physical surface defects. File system repair utilities are of limited use in such cases. Take a look at Advanced Hard Disk Tools in the Restarters Wiki.

Unless you can boot your iMac into Linux and DOS utilities (I don’t know whether that’s possible) you’ll need to take out the hard disk and temporarily attach it to a PC. There are 2 possibilities:

Spinrite can often recover unreadable sectors by doing its own error correction on the aggregate data accumulated from many reads. It’s far more persistent than any OS or the drive’s internal error recovery logic. If it succeeds it’ll remap the sector. If it was a transient error from a physical jolt or a voltage spike during a write and the disk is otherwise in good health, you can continue using it. However, Spinrite costs $89, but you get a lifetime personal licence and a money back guarantee if it disappoints.

If you can boot into Linux of any flavour then ddrescue will clone your hard disc to another. In a first pass it’ll read everything it can and keep a log of any sectors it couldn’t. You can then rerun it as many times as you like and it’ll just retry the sectors it has so far failed to read. This is a good option if you fear your disk is could die completely at any moment, allowing you to recover as much data as possible while you can. After the first run, running Spinrite might well enable it to succeed completely on a second pass.

Or, you could just find a professional data recovery firm. For a 3-figure sum they should be able to get your data back if it’s humanly possible, and should only charge if they succeed.

~Philip Le Riche

Or install to an external drive.

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MacBook won't start up

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