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MBP won't boot due to hard disk problem

I have a late 2008 which just started to have problems booting up.

The trouble started a week ago, when my MBP would shut down unexpectedly while I'm working(on battery power). When I tried to reboot from battery power it didn't work. However, it's not the issue of low battery level. I had plenty juice in the battery. So I attached to the mag safe power supply, it would boot up again.

On yesterday morning after another unexpected shut down, I plugged the mag saft back in and hope it would boot up again. Never again. It will alwasy stuck at the gray screen with a spinning circle. So I did quite a few standard checks such as booting from Snow Leopard install DVD, and run DiskUtility. It tells me my MBP Hard Drive has problems and can not be repaired. So I figure it's the HD problem. Now I just want to salvage some data off from that HD, get a new HD and start over again.

I tried to boot from DiskWarrior 4.2 DVD, it didn't boot up. It boot up fine with Snow Leopard DVD. So the optical drive works fine.

The HD is the Hitachi 7200rpm travelstar 250GB.

Any advice?

MacBook Pro 15 Late 2008, Mac OS X (10.6.6), 250G Hitachi travelstar 7200RPM

Posted on Jan 30, 2011 12:26 PM

Reply
14 replies

Jan 30, 2011 3:52 PM in response to roubaix

Are you going to replace the drive yourself? If so, it may be just as easy to replace the drive with a new one, and then place the old drive in an enclosure and mount it on your desktop. If it still spins up, you should be able to retrieve your data from it.

Not sure why your Mac won't boot to the Disk Warrior disc. Could there be a problem with the DW disc itself?

Good luck!

Jan 30, 2011 4:32 PM in response to roubaix

Is your external drive bootable? If not, do you have access to another Mac?

The reason I ask is that if you have a bootable external drive you can start to this drive by holding the Option key at startup to select the external drive and possibly see the files on the internal drive and rescue them.

Access to another Mac means you can start yours in target mode by holding the t-key at startup then attach your Mac to the other with a firewire cable and hopefully see your hd to copy the important files.

When using DU did it show the Smart status as ok? There are at least 2 other disk repair programs that can sometimes repair the disk when DU can't - Disk Warrior and TechTool Pro.

Just some ideas. The 1st of these I used when in Africa to rescue everything successfully when my hd was in the process of failing.

Neville

Jan 30, 2011 6:52 PM in response to roubaix

Well done!

When your recovery is finished you could try erasing the hard drive using DU on your tower and see whether it formats OK, then try re-installing the basic OS to see whether it will actually work. You should be able to do this installation via the tower.

With my MBP in Africa, as well as the hd replacement, the drive module (I'm not sure of the correct term) also had to be replaced as the failing disk had apparently messed with this. When the dealer had received the new hd & fitted it it would not work, hence the further investigation. Fortunately this was all covered under Applecare warranty - something more to think about.

Neville

Jan 30, 2011 8:13 PM in response to roubaix

You're familiar with the ifixit site?

http://www.ifixit.com/

You can find step by step instructions for replacing the drive there. If you have a Unibody Mac, which it sounds like you do, the instructions are also in your owner's manual.

OWC has some drive + enclosure kits, and I think also some video instructions. Also check with Newegg and Tiger Direct for drives--Newegg especially will often have specials on them.

I agree with Neville's suggestion to erase and reformat the old hard drive once you've retrieved your data from it and see if you can install the OS on it. If you can and then can boot from the old drive, you could download and run SMART Utility:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/systemdiskutilities/smartutility.html

You can download the demo and run it several times for free. It will give you a really comprehensive view of the physical health of your drive, and because it seems to be a bit more critical than Disk Utility, it can possibly detect impending hard drive failure sooner.

Of course, if you are under warranty, you can just let Apple fix it under warranty.

Good luck!

Jan 31, 2011 8:14 AM in response to roubaix

You need to ask someone who really knows, but I think that you actually have to take the extra step of erasing the drive in order to remove your information. There used to be three options--Install Mac OS X for the first time, Archive and Install, or Erase and Install. The way it seems to work with Leopard and Snow Leopard is that the default is more or less equivalent to an Archive and Install, so that just the OS is installed and everything else remains in place.

I observed something like this when trying to set up a used MBP for a friend. We reinstalled the OS, and nothing was changed. We had to actually erase the hard drive in order to get the Welcome screen.

Again, it's best to ask somebody who really knows about this before proceeding. There may well be pitfalls to watch out for that I am not aware of. If you don't get an answer here, ask on the Snow Leopard forum. Also, take a look at the tips posted at the top of the "Installation and Setup" section of the Snow Leopard forum.

It's also safest to make a complete backup of everything in advance--just in case something goes wrong. If all goes well, you won't need it, but if something goes wrong, you'll be glad you did.

Good luck!

Jan 31, 2011 2:39 PM in response to roubaix

The problem is that we don't know for certain whether the hd itself is faulty (physically), whether it's some fault in the drive format or whether it was some part of the installed software that caused the problems.

If a physical fault then replacement is the only option.
If a format fault then reformatting (which wipes all information) could rescue functionality, perhaps with portions of the drive being excluded from use.
If a software fault perhaps the archive and install of the OS without reformatting would suffice in which case you probably will still have most of what you desire left.

To achieve what you want I would probably try to use a SuperDuper type program to create a mirror image of the hd software. You can operate this from your tower. It creates a complete copy of your software apart from a few operational files that are of little consequence. Then you can reformat the drive or install a new drive and copy back the whole software package that has been duplicated including all plugins, etc. To do this you will need enough storage for the copy obviously. If the problem is software-related this might well copy the problem files and return them too!

Your choice but if you can I would choose to do the SuperDuper copy anyway.

Neville

Jan 31, 2011 3:34 PM in response to Neville Mayfield

I totally agree with making a Super Duper copy of the drive before proceeding with anything else--that creates an exact copy of the problem drive so that everything is preserved. It would also create a duplicate that could be used to experiment with.

One way to do this is to get the replacement drive for the MBP and place it in an enclosure, maybe even using one of OWC's kits. The MBP's drive is already mounted on the Mac Pro's desktop, and the new drive in the enclosure can also be mounted on the MacPro's desktop and properly formatted using Disk Utility. Then Super Duper can be launched and used to copy the MBP's drive to the new drive. Once that's done, the OS could be reinstalled on the new drive and we would be able to see if that cured the password problem. Since Super Duper can make a bootable clone, we could see if the MBP would boot from it by plugging it into a MBP port and trying an option boot. If everything works, you can just install the new drive in the MBP.

Doing something like this does not touch the original MBP drive and its contents, so everything is preserved.

Just about any external drive would work for this purpose--it doesn't necessarily need to be the one that you intend to use as a replacement.

I agree that we don't really know for certain just what the fault is, but I think a Super Duper copy would be in order no matter how we go about doing the troubleshooting.

Feb 11, 2011 12:11 AM in response to S.U.

So guys,

I'm reporting back with some new info. I received my OWC 500G Hitachi drive(7200RPM) with enclosure. I booted up my MBP in target mode and hooked it up to my tower. I SuperDupered my older MBP 250G drive to the new 500G. Then I swapped out the "problmatic" 250G with the new 500G. The new 500G drive booted up nicely. Three days passed. Then tonight my MBP shut down suddenly just like the old 250G. My MBP was on battery power. I tried to power it back up in battery power, no luck. It would start on a blank gray screen then shuts off again. So I plug the power back in MBP. It boot up fine, but took a few minutes. Now this worries me quite a bit because that's exactly how it happened with my old 250G. It first would shut down on battery power, but it would boot up with power supply. But eventually, it wouldn't boot up at all even if it's plugged in.

Any thoughts on why it keeps shutting down by itself?

Thanks.

Shaun

Feb 13, 2011 3:31 PM in response to roubaix

I was just looking into another post and researching possible automatic shutdown causes. It seems that overheating can cause a shutdown. This shouldn't happen unless ventilation is restricted so that the fans can't adequately deal with the heat - such as operating with the computer on soft surfaces which wrap around the base. Max heat can be produced with some processes in games and probably other intensive program processes.

Use of a program such as Temperature Monitor might enable this to be checked.

Neville

MBP won't boot due to hard disk problem

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