My 2010 MacBook Pro won’t start up - new hardrive?

Use Disk Utility to Repair/First Aid your drive.

Since your Mac is not working normally, you can invoke Recovery Mode by holding Command-R at Startup.

Recovery Mode contains several useful functions, including a special version of Disk Utility that does not need the rest of MacOS to be running to do its job of repairing your disk.

"Regular" Recovery gets the Utilities from special partition on your normal boot drive. If you see a spinning globe, you have invoked (or fallen back to) Internet Recovery, and you see the Globe because it is fetching the Utilities from the Internet. This takes a little longer, so be patient.

About macOS Recovery - Apple Support

Once you get Disk Utility running, this article describes how to repair your disk:

Repair a disk using Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support

Once Disk Utility reports your drive has been successfully repaired, you can try booting MacOS in the regular way. If that works, you have fixed the problems and you are done.

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If Disk Utility made some repairs, but there are still some problems remaining, you should run it again until your drive comes clean, or Disk Utility reports it cannot be repaired.

If disk Utility suggests you should ERASE your drive, that is a radical step -- this will delete all your files with no possible way of recovering them. Post back here for additional options before you do that.

Start up in safe mode

To start up in safe mode:

1. Start or restart your Mac, then immediately press and hold the Shift key. The Apple logo appears on your display. If you don't see the Apple logo, learn what to do.
2. Release the Shift key when you see the login window. If your startup disk is encrypted with FileVault, you might be asked to log in twice: once to unlock the startup disk, and again to log in to the Finder.

To leave safe mode, restart your Mac without pressing any keys during startup.

Let me know how it goes
Regards.

The solid Apple is not in the Mac's ROM at Cold start. The Apple logo can only appear when it is fetched in the first "blob" of software loaded from a 'magic' place on the boot drive, or checked and re-run from RAM after a Restart. Then a whole lot of stuff is initialized, and the progress Bar moves part way across. After a cold start, seeing the solid Apple appear says your drive is not completely dead.

The next step requires a lot of files by name, so the File System is initialized, and the Boot Drive is Mounted. If the drive directory is damaged, the drive can not be Mounted, so your Mac begins one pass of Disk Utility Repair. This will take an additional about five minutes. During this process, the progress bar may be extended, and will grow by an additional amount not seen on a routine startup.

at the end of that process, it will attempt to Mount the drive again:

-- if the drive Mounts, boot-up continues.

-- if the drive cannot be Mounted, your Mac can do nothing more, so it powers off.

WHat would happen if I clicked erase or restore?

Restore is used to make disk-to-file or file-to-disk copies of entire drives. Since your drive is still not right if it has not been repaired completely, this may not have much value in this situation.

ERASE creates a brand new Directory on the drive, and also creates a new Volume. But once you have done that, your files are gone forever.

I am assuming you do Not have a Trusted backup, or you would not be stuck. ¿Do you have a Trusted Backup?

I think your best bet is to buy a new Drive (a candidate for replacing your internal drive) AND an external enclosure or drive adapter to use the new drive as an external. You can use Recovery mode (from the old drive) to ERASE the new drive, download and Install a fresh copy of MacOS on it, and get your Mac working again.

Once the Mac is working, you can use Utilities like Data Rescue by Prosoft to reach onto the damaged drive, and attempt to rescue some of your files.

Regardless of where you are in the world, this site in the US is extremely Mac centric and prides itself on its Mac support. So the stuff they carry is known to work on a Mac and be trouble-free. Even if you can not easily buy in the US market, you can use the site as a guide to what sorts of things are available for Mac, without getting bogged down by stuff that will never work on a Mac or is just too much trouble.

MacSales.com

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It’s nothing to do with the charging port, but maybe plug the drive into another Mac and see if that will help with repairs. Erase would wipe everything on it and Restore would wipe the drive and then put content from another drive on it. Another good one would be a Hitachi HDD.

When you are actually running in Recovery Mode, the two messages you received:

1) restart in recovery to do the repair --AND--

2) the disk could not be unmounted ...

are both impossible.

Perhaps you were running is Safe Mode, or something else?

You can ONLY install or Re-Install on a disk that has a good Directory. Unless/Until you fix that problem, you are stuck.

This may indicate a hard drive issue that disk utility can’t detect because the issue affects disk utility in recovery mode so this could indicate extreme bad sectors so it may be necessary to get a new hard disk.

It could be that your hard disk is failing. In recovery mode, what is the s.m.a.r.t status of your disk drive? If the smart status is Failing or Not Supported you may need to get a new hard disk. Anyway the Samsung 850 EVO would be great for your laptop but it would be better if you got the 512 gb version.

Anyway I’ve got a 2011 MacBook and I don’t think you should get a new one. The Samsung 850 EVO is not a hard disk it’s a Solid State Drive. It will work, but it is not a spinning disk, but that should not be a issue. In fact it should be much faster, but if you do get a new one it has to have a SATA connectior