Earlier this week I received a call from a local business client who was having problems publishing a self-maintained website for their store. Although my service call began with troubleshooting a problematic website, the situation promptly escalated to showing symptoms of a serious hardware issue.
At first it seemed like the Macbook Pro owner’s issues were purely related to iWeb and needing to be properly configured for their web hosting account. It wasn’t long before I discovered that her Mac was having issues accessing files from its hard drive. And that’s when it happened…
Depending on the age, model, and whether your MacBook Pro is a Unibody, it can be easy, hard, or downright impossible to replace your hard drive at home. While Apple products are notoriously known for being challenging to repair, hard drive replacements on old MacBook Pro’s are relatively straightforward.
Photo eraser inpaint 1 64gb. Upon a system restart, the Mac would not boot past the initial gray screen with Apple logo, spinning wheel and frozen progress bar.
It was quite obvious the computer was not successfully accessing its operating system files but it was too early yet to be sure whether it was due to mechanical issues with the hard drive or motherboard, missing or corrupted files stored on the hard drive. I was going to have to narrow it down before making a diagnosis that could cost the client unnecessary data loss, expenses for hardware or labor.
Obviously if you are stuck at the gray screen of agony, booting past it isn’t an option. But you can boot from your system disc labeled Mac OS Install DVD. To do so, pop it into your optical drive and hold the Alt/Option key while you power up the computer. Keep holding it til you see your boot drive options and then click the Mac OS Install DVD to boot from it. Once past the language selection, you can access utilities from the top menu. Disk Utility is the one you want. When it opens, click on your hard drive in the left column sidebar and the click Verify Disk followed by Repair Disk under First Aid. If your computer completes its process, then it might just be your lucky day. You should now initiate a normal restart to see if your problem has been resolved. But if your situation is like mine, you might get failures indicating the hard drive is unreadable. Pass go, but do not collect $200.
This is when you boot your afflicted machine as though it was an external drive to a healthy Mac. To do so, first turn on your sick Mac while holding down the T key and you will see a gray screen with a large occasionally moving Firewire logo. You can now connect the two computers via firewire cable and boot the healthy computer while holding the Alt/Option key as described above. Your sickly computer’s hard drive in target disk mode should appear as a boot option on your healthy computer. Choose it and proceed. If you are able to boot to it successfully, you can try again to run Disk Utility from Applications->Utilities and to verify/repair the hard drive. If this works without a hitch, again try and reboot your computer normally to see if your problem has been solved. If not, keep reading.
Your Mac will automatically attempt some more gloves-come-off disk repair measures when you boot into safe mode.
In my case this process worked and I was able to boot into safe mode with the affected computer. You can now restart the computer as normal and you will likely be able to boot now, possibly after a brief progress bar display during bootup. If this works for you, you should still be concerned! Even though your computer is working seemingly normally, you should consider yourself blessed (I don’t do luck). If you’ve found my advice helpful so far, heed my next directive: use your extra life to immediately make an entire Time Machine backup onto a reliable clean external hard drive. You will need this if/when your hard drive crashes if you want to recover your documents and/or applications.
Short of sending your hard drive to an expensive data recovery specialist, this might be your last resort for a DIY fix. These solutions may require you to remove your hard drive, use a live boot cd or target disk mode. You should refer to their respective developer’s website for a thorough outline of the process.
In any case, there is a reason your hard drive is having these issues. Replacing your hard drive very soon should be your plan especially if you have a hard drive more than 3 years old and you don’t have a strong hunch that you caused your own issue in any way.
I recommend Seagate Momentus 7200 RPM hard drives and I use them in my own and client’s machines. Replacing my original Hitachi hard drive (which had incidentally NOT failed, but was critically full at only 160GB) truly breathed new life into my Macbook Pro. Not only did it provide tons more storage space for me, but the 7200RPM performance and larger 16MB cache has greater responsiveness and performance.
My MacBook Pro has stopped working as normal. When I turn it on it takes me to the select user screen. When I log in, I get a grey loading bar under the avatar and user name. But then MacBook Pro won't accept the password. When this gets to about half way the computer shuts down. If I go to Disk Utility I get strange disk names. If I try to verify 'Macintosh HD' I get an error saying 'Error: This disk needs to be repaired. Click Repair Disk.' I can't do this as Repair Disk is greyed out. I need some help about how to fix the improperly working MacBook hard drive and get data back.
When talking about Mac hard drive stopped working, we usually mean the errors like Mac hard drive dead or crashed,Mac internal hard drive not mounting, or Macintosh HD not mounted, unrecognized, unreadable, inaccessible, etc. This Mac not working error may happen to MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iMac equally.
In this article we will talk about how to fix MacBook hard drive stopped working issue and how to recover lost data from the not working Mac hard drive.
Disk Utility is designed to scan your connected drives for errors, erase a disk, repair disk permissions, check the disk's structure for physical errors and more. If MacBook hard drive stopped working, you can run Disk Utility in macOS Recovery mode.
Step 1: Restart your MacBook, hold down the Command + R keys immediately upon hearing the startup chime and hold the keys until the Apple logo appears.
Step 2: Select Disk Utility under macOS Utilities menu and click Continue.
Best keyboard and mouse for mac. Step 3: Select the stopped working MacBook hard drive from the sidebar.
Step 4: Click First Aid and wait while Disk Utility fixing hard drive errors.
If you get the disk appears to be OK or errors have been repaired, restart your MacBook and ideally it will work properly now.
IfDisk Utility can't repair this disk, the only way to fix the stopped working MacBook hard drive is reformatting the drive and reinstalling macOS - resetting the Mac to factory settings.
Before formatting the stopped working MacBook hard drive, please back up as much of your data as possible. Or, you can follow the steps as below to recover lost data from the not working hard drive and fix the issue without losing data.
Step 1: Recover lost data from not working MacBook hard drive. How to do a screen shot on mac.
iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac is reliableMac hard drive failure recovery software that is able to recover lost data from Macintosh HD,recover lost data from external hard drives, USB drives, SD cards, memory cards, Pen drives, etc., no matter it is corrupted, formatted, unmountable, unreadable, inaccessible on macOS Catalina/Mojave/High Sierra/Sierra and Mac OS X.
Method 1: If you have only one unbootable Mac computer
If you have only one Mac computer and it stops working now, you can still recover lost data by running iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac from iBoysoft Server and recover lost data from the MacBook hard drive.This method is highly recommended because it saves you a lot of troubles in finding another Mac or creating a bootable drive.
Note: Before you follow the steps below, you have to make sure your Mac has Internet connection.
1. Reboot this Mac and press Command +Option +R key combinaitons.
2. Choose a network for your Mac. Install minecraft texture packs mac. You need to make your Mac connected to the Internet all the time.
3. Click Utilities and select Terminal from the drop-down menu.
4. Run the following command:
This will launch iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac through iBoysoft Server.
5. Candy bar reviews. After launching iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac, you can select the MacBook hard drive and recover lost data with few clicks.
Method 2: If you have two Mac computers
1. Download iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac on another Mac computer.
2. Install and launch iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac.
3. Click iBoysoft Data Recovery on menu bar and then select 'Create Boot Drive'.
4. Insert a USB drive into your Mac computer.
5. Follow the wizard to create a bootable recovery drive.
6. After that, please insert iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac bootable USB drive into the unbootable Mac computer, and then press the Power button and Option key (⌥) to start the computer up.
7. Select iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac from the boot options.
Note: If you're running macOS Mojave or earlier, iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac will launch immediately when your Mac boots up. But, if your Mac is running macOS Catalina, you need two additional steps to launch this program.
8. Wait for your Mac to boot up, open 'Terminal' application from 'Utilities' drop-down menu.
9. Run the following command:
Now you can recover lost data from the unbootable Mac computer.
Step 2: Erase the not working MacBook hard drive in macOS Recovery mode.
1. Boot into macOS Recovery mode in the mentioned way above.
2. Go to Disk Utility.
3. Select the not working hard drive from the sidebar.
3. Click on Erase on the top. Here you need to setup the format type and name, then wait till the process completed.
Step 3: Reinstall operating system to the reformatted hard drive in macOS Recovery mode.
It will take a while when reinstalling the OS. Then, your MacBook should work without problem.
If your MacBook still does not work, it's very likely the hard drive is physically damaged and need to be repaired or replaced.
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