Problem with My Mac Air Hard disk

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berrymv Author

Level 1

8 points

Problem with My Mac Air Hard disk

I have a MacBook Air that will not boot past the spinning Wheel.

I have been given this Mac Book, and know nothing about them, but am PC Savy being a MS professional.

I have run the checkdisk which ha told me I have bad sectors.

Can I restore a New OS over this disk, or do i need a new disk ?

If i get a new disk how do I load the OS on it as all sites I visit seem to infer the OS is always resident on the disk ??

Thanks in advance

MacBook Air, Problem with Hard Disk

Posted on Sep 27, 2016 11:16 AM

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Answer 1

chris_g1

Community Specialist

Sep 28, 2016 3:37 PM in response to berrymv

Hi berrymv,

Thanks for using the Apple Support Communities. If you have a new-to-you MacBook Air that won't boot and is showing volume or drive issues, you have a couple options. To start fresh, you would most likely want to erase & reformat the drive, then install a fresh copy of the operating system. This may resolve the bad sectors issue if it is simply a volume corruption or mapping issue, though not if there is a physical issue with the drive itself*. If this MacBook Air is a relatively recent model (post-2010), you should be able to boot to and reinstall the OS from a remote Internet volume, a feature known as Internet Recovery. This will install a fresh copy of the OS version the machine originally shipped with (or OS X 10.7 for some earlier machines that shipped with 10.6). You may find the information and steps outlined in the following articles helpful:

How to reinstall OS X - Apple Support

Disk Utility for Mac: Erase a volume using Disk Utility

About OS X Recovery - Apple Support
(*Note: MacBook Airs released post-2010 have solid state drives, either model specific or hard soldered to the main board, and may have limited options for replacement)

Regards

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