Boot Problems- Hard Drive Damaged? Something Else?

Yesterday my MacBook Pro went to the blue screen of death after freezing for a few minutes. When I restarted it, I couldn't get beyond the apple with the spinning graphic below it. I tried resetting the SMC and PRAM, archiving and reinstalling (which hung up every time), and ultimately backed up the files I could (many generated errors and could not be copied) using Target Disk. After backing up, I did an erase and reinstall, which was successful (mostly). After getting the system running again, I attempted to update from what I think is 10.4.5 to 10.4.11. At the end of the download, it crashed, and on restart would not boot again (apple logo with random flickerings of the "no" sign).
At first, I assumed hard drive damage for the following reasons:
-Something fell and landed right over the hard drive, putting a small dent in the open case
-The files that would not copy seemed like they could have been corrupted by physical disk damage
-The hangups seem like they could be caused by the same issue
The things that worry me about this diagnosis are the fact that the erase and reinstall worked, and that the problem seems confined to boot errors (it has only successfully booted once since the first crash).
1. Can I confidently call this a hard drive failure, order one from OWC tomorrow morning overnight, and consider it solved?
2. If not, are there any diagnostic tools I can use to help zero in on my problem?
3. What, if any additional information would he helpful?
Before today's successes/failures, I was all ready to pull the trigger on a new drive (Hitachi 7200RPM 200GB). However, now I'm not so sure. Any advice is greatly appreciated.

Thank you again for your advice.
At this point, I am amazed to say I have it up and running and was even able to upgrade to 10.4.11, which caused one of the recent crashes. I have in fact prepared my data for "the unthinkable" (which has now happened four times in the last forty-eight hours), but this whole "working" thing is pretty creepy. (I tried to pop the top to see if the hard drive has any physical damage from the dent, but apparently the only thing harder to find in this town than a FireWire cable is a Torx T-6. I guess I'll be ordering OWC's lame eleven-piece $17 tool kit. Oh well.).
Is this normal? Can I expect another crash soon?
I think I'm going to try copying some large files to see if I can't repeat my failure. Maybe I've just been really lucky this particular time.

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Two possibly unrelated questions - Hard Drive and something else.

Sorry I only have symptoms not specifics at this point. I have an intel core duo mac mini, running 10.5.6, with 4 gigs of ram. I have a couple of issues that may be unrelated: A possible Hard drive issue and another strange issue. I don't know if there are related but since I may have to go through the hassle of cracking open my mini I thought I would ask.
First issue when I stream video over the internet sometimes and only sometimes my machine will suddenly restart, no shutdown, no prompts, just instantaneously restart, other times it will stream hours of video without issue. This issue has plagued me since 10.4 and all subsequent upgrades.
Second issue is what I believe is a hard drive failure, but I'm not sure and I don't want to buy/replace it if that's not the issue. I updated to 10.5.6 a few months ago and was running with no issues although lately it has been getting slower. Last week my parents came over to watch "24" online so after working on my computer all morning I restarted my machine thinking it would stream better, upon restart it would get to the large apple with the spinning graphic and hang up, then about after a minute in it would simply power off. Confused I restarted with the same results. I tried this probably 10 times with the same result. Checked all the cables, etc. nothing. so next I booted into the Leopard Installer and ran disk utility. At first the hard drive didn't show up in the left column so I quit disk utility and launched startup disk, again no hard drive, then I re-launched disk utility - now it showed up. I ran repair disk since repair permissions was greyyed out. It came back with errors saying disk couldn't be repaired. Sorry the only error message I recall is a damaged catalog B-tree. So I restarted and for the first time in 10 hours my machine actually restarted and everything came back. From here I backed up everything important. Since then it has restarted 3 times will no issues, other than running a little slower than usual. So last night I ran Disk Warrior and receive the error message. " Could not rebuild due to a disk malfunction. A disk malfunction is a failure of or damage to any mechanical component of the disk device or any component connected to it. Since I had disk warrior in there I checked the hardware test option where it checks the S.M.A.R.T. something or another, sorry for the choice of words I've never done that, and it returned saying the drive was fine. So here I am a bit confused if it's the hard drive or another issue any ideas.

Hi daredman01-
Could the unit simply be overheating? Have you vacuumed out the air vent that rns along the bottom edge of the mini?
Good job getting things backed up. How full is the hard drive?
Luck-
-DP

Boot problem / Hard drive won't spin up and folder icon shows

Hi,
Last week my ipod started giving me this problem, which started by it just stopping in the middle of a song (possibly because of lack of battery power).
When the ipod tries to boot I see the apple icon and hear the disk try to spin up for about 2 seconds. Then it gives a click, spins down, and starts the process all over again for several times until finally showing the dreaded folder icon.
When this happened last week I tried to charge using the cradle, but it didn't help. When I plugged it into the wall socket, VOILA! it worked. I went on my merry way for a week of listening, assuming the problem was all caused by a weak battery. During this week the computer was not able to mount the ipod disk.
Until yesterday, when the battery ran out in the middle of playing. The same exact symptoms occur, but this time the wall socket doesn't help. I think there was a sudden drop in power because the battery was fairly charged and then I saw it at complete zero, and I have also seen the battery icon show for a split second when trying to reset. I have of course tried as many of the 5 R's as I could do, but with no luck.
any help would be greatly appreciated
thanks,
ubloomie

If you can open up the case, you can try reviving the hard drive one last time. some people have had luck with sealing the drive in a plastic bag (to keep out moisture) and putting it in the freezer, and then firing it up.
Also you could try giving it a good sharp shock, which sometimes gets you one more spin-up.
1.25GHz Mac mini 1024MB , Airport+Bluetooth  17" 1.67GHz PowerBook 2GB Mac OS X (10.4.8)  iMac Indigo 350MHz (10.3.9)

Boot camp / partition problems, hard drive damaged?

I was in the middle of using boot camp to allocate 13gb to windows when my macbook pro crashed (the crash screen with the turn off and restart text came up), then when i restarted and ran boot camp it said that my harddrive couldn't be partitioned and to repair it using disk utility. I ran that, but the repair disk is greyed out, the repair permissions doesn't have any effect and when i clicked verify disk it says;
"Disk utility stopped verifying macintosh hd because the following error was encountered filesystem verify or repair failed"
and the log is
Verifying volume “Macintosh HD”
Performing live verification.
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Checking multi-linked files.
Checking Catalog hierarchy.
Checking Extended Attributes file.
Checking volume bitmap.
Checking volume information.
Invalid volume free block count
(It should be 15200369 instead of 11898629)
The volume Macintosh HD needs to be repaired.
Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed.
Can you help me out? It's essential i get a number of windows products running.

Ok, that seemed to work for part of the problem.
It repaired the disk but whenever I run boot camp it keeps throwing up that crash screen and i have to go through the process of repairing the disk again.
I've ran boot camp with no other programs running in the background or open and without disturbing it while it's allocating the partition and it still crashes.
Any ideas how to get it working?
Heres the crash report
Fri May 30 00:22:56 2008
panic(cpu 1 caller 0x0031D1B3): "hfs_lock: locking against myself!"@/SourceCache/xnu/xnu-1228.3.13/bsd/hfs/hfs_cnode.c:986
Backtrace, Format - Frame : Return Address (4 potential args on stack)
0x3d2476d8 : 0x12b0e1 (0x457024 0x3d24770c 0x13321a 0x0)
0x3d247728 : 0x31d1b3 (0x483cc0 0x0 0x3d247758 0x1f0d72)
0x3d247758 : 0x31db5b (0x5399ae0 0x3 0x0 0x4384804)
0x3d247848 : 0x1f2e30 (0x3d247860 0x0 0x3d247888 0x1f4d49)
0x3d247888 : 0x1da8f0 (0xa1f25a0 0x4a09ca4 0x38ed58 0x0)
0x3d2478a8 : 0x1da95d (0xa1f25a0 0x0 0x246 0x49e1500)
0x3d2478c8 : 0x3346c6 (0xa1f25a0 0x68000 0x57bbee0 0x49e1500)
0x3d247bc8 : 0x334a22 (0x4a09ca4 0x17f7fff 0x3e616c 0x0)
0x3d247c58 : 0x32bc00 (0x4384804 0xf8000000 0x17 0x4a09ca4)
0x3d247cd8 : 0x1f5039 (0x3d247d08 0x0 0x3d247cf8 0x0)
0x3d247d38 : 0x1e7e0c (0x4381c70 0x80006802 0x3d247ee0 0x0)
0x3d247f78 : 0x3dbe77 (0x49e1500 0x4a09ba0 0x4a09be4 0xb0080d78)
0x3d247fc8 : 0x19f084 (0x46543a0 0x0 0x1a20b5 0x46543a0)
No mapping exists for frame pointer
Backtrace terminated-invalid frame pointer 0xb0080d88
BSD process name corresponding to current thread: DiskManagementTo
Mac OS version:
9C31
Kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 9.2.0: Tue Feb 5 16:13:22 PST 2008; root:xnu-1228.3.13~1/RELEASE_I386
System model name: MacBookPro3,1 (Mac-F4238BC8)

Hello, can someone help me: my eMac G4 700 MHz. I can not boot it. If he starts appears on the screen, only a small "folder with a question mark." The Mac was not used 1 year. Question 1: Problem = hard drive? Question 2: Problem = PRAM battery? the What

Hello, can someone help me: my eMac G4 700 MHz. I can not boot it. If he starts appears on the screen, only a small "folder with a question mark." The Mac was not used 1 year.
Question 1: Problem = hard drive?
Question 2: Problem = PRAM battery?
the
What can I do to boot?

Restart with the Option key held down.
If the internal drive shows up, it's the PRAM battery.
If it doesn't, insert a compatible Mac OS 9 or X install disk, click the button with the circular arrow, and either repair the internal drive or install a new OS on it. If it doesn't show up in Disk First Aid(9) or the Disk Utility(X), it's either not plugged in or needs to be replaced.
(97530)

DV7-6185us wont boot from hard drive.

I recently installed a new hard drive after the one it came with completely crashed. After installation of new hard drives, I inserted and installed all of the recovery disks needed for the new hard drive. Upon completetion it said it needed a restart and after restart I get a message saying I need a OS for the hard drive for boot up.
I went into my bios to make sure the hard drive was first in boot order which it is but when trying to pick where to put from on the bios screen it only give me the cd option. I ran a full diagnostic of the hard drive and everything checks out. I made sure to unplus the hard drive and tried a different slot and still get the same thing. Installation when fine but still won't boot from hard drive.
Is there something that i'm missing? The hard drive is fine. So what could it be?

Hi,
Assuming this is just a problem with the recovery media, here's an alternative option you could try.
Before trying the following, make sure you can still read the 25 Character Product Activation key on your Windows COA label ( 5 blocks of 5 alpha/numeric sets ).
An example of a COA Label can be seen Here.
You can create a Windows 7 installation disc yourself using another PC - just download the correct Disc Image ( this must be the same version that originally came with your notebook - this is listed as Windows 7 Home Premium ) from the link below and use an application such as ImgBurn to burn the ISO correctly to a blank DVD - a guide on using ImgBurn to write an ISO to a disc is Here. These Images are clean and from a well-respected source - Digital River.
Windows 7 Images.
Use the disc to perform the installation, enter the Windows activation key found on the COA Label when requested and when the installation has completed, use the 'Phone Method' detailed in the link below to activate the OS - this method supported by Microsoft and is popular with people who just want a clean installation of Windows 7 without the additional software load normally bundled with OEM installations.
http://www.kodyaz.com/articles/how-to-activate-windows-7-by-phone.aspx
Any additional drivers and software you may need can be found Here.
Regards,
DP-K
****Click the White thumb to say thanks****
****Please mark Accept As Solution if it solves your problem****
****I don't work for HP****
Microsoft MVP - Windows Experience

Erased boot camps hard drive with time machine?

so, i completely erased windows by erasing what was on boot camps hard drive. Boot camp cannot read my "start up" harddrive now. and the harddrive will not turn into a jornaled macintosh hard drive. i checked it with disk utility and it claims to be ok. is there a way i canget back the hard drive and my windows 7 to start up all over again?

I am having a similar problem. I use a Lacie external hard drive connected to an Airport Time Capsule via USB to store my itunes library. Yesterday I disconnected the external drive from the ATC and connected it to my macbook pro via fire wire to transfer 40 gigabytes of media files from my laptop to the external drive directly rather than over wifi. When I reattached the external drive to the ATC the Lacie drive didn't show up even after rebooting everything. I then disconnected from the ATC and reconnected to the laptop and now I get an error message saying the Lacie disk is unrecognizable and needs to be reformated. The Lacie drive was being included in the time machine backups so the files should be available through time machine but I don't see anyway to access them because the Lacie disk icon doesn't appear in the time machine backups. Is there another way to browse the files?
I have had issues with Lacie disks not showing up on the desktop before, particularly when transferring files from one computer to another. The transfer usually goes fine but then when I reattach the drive to the first computer it isn't recognized anymore until I reboot and it sometimes requires a couple of reboots. I initially tried to connect the external drive to both the ATC and the laptop but that didn't work, although now I'm wondering if that was because the connection to the laptop was firewire rather than USB like the ATC. In any case I currently have over a terabyte of data on my lacie that I can't access which includes my entire itunes library and backup files from multiple computers which were "cleaned" but not restored.
Disk utility sees the drive but can't verify or repair and tells me to backup as many files as possible and then reformat. Unfortunately I can't see ANY files to backup because the disk won't mount anywhere. If anyone has a recommendation for utilities to recover the files I'd be most grateful to get them.

Lombard won't boot to Hard Drive

I erased and installed 10.3, once that is done it restarts and works great. Then after I turn it off, or restart again, or unplug AC adapter from the wall it will not boot to hard drives, boots to the circle slash. I booted to install cd and ran disk utilities then when I restart nothing. The only time I can get the powerbook to work is right after I install 10.3. The date/time is always remembered, but I do have a dead battery - won't hold charge at all. Thinking about buying battery, just really thought I should be able to run the laptop on ac adapter. Any thoughts are greatly appreciated.

TJ,
Welcome to the Discussions.
See if the suggestions in this article, especially the resetting of the PRAM and power manager help:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106805
One issue the Lombard suffers more than other black G3s is a failed backside L2 cache. Once you are up and running again, go to the System Profiler > Hardware and see if it reports either 512K or 1MB of L2 cache or is missing. If this is the case, resetting the power manager, at least when running 9.x, will allow a successful start, but of course the problem is still present.
If you have a bootable OS 8.6 > 9.2.2 CD, and from a cold start, not restart, boot to the CD and see if you get a warning dialogue that there is a problem with RAM or cache memory.
Message was edited by: jpl

Booting a hard drive with Windows XP on it.

Hi all,
I want to boot a hard drive that was in my mother's dead laptop from 10 years ago via a ATA/IDE to USB enclosure with my 2011 Macbook Pro 13''.
The hard drive has Windows XP on it and I am running Mountain Lion. I want to know if this is possible, and if so, how can I do it?
Thank you in advance!

You can't boot from the XP drive, nor can your Mac run XP, but you can read it's files from the drive and copy them with the right adapter.
Mac's can read NTFS formatted drives, but can't write to them without additional paid software installed.
If there are files that can't be opened on the Mac, even with the free LibreOffice and VLC player, then you could install Windows 7 Pro + either into a virtual machine program or into Apple's BootCamp.
Windows in BootCamp or Virtual Machine?
Windows 7 Pro and above will run most XP programs, else they provide a XP download to virtualize XP in Win 7 that will run the files provided you have a compatible program installed.
http://windows.microsoft.com/is-IS/windows7/install-and-use-windows-xp-mode-in-w indows-7
It can become quite complicated with three nested operating systems, so you need to have plenty of RAM, 16GB preferred.

IPod Classic: what causes hard drive damage?

I charged my iPod Classic (160GB) this morning, properly ejected the device, used it for a few minutes, then it just..... crashed. I've tried running tests and nothing happened. I've also tried reconnecting it to my laptop (Mac) but it indicated Error 1434/ said the device is not repairable/. Then went straight to restoring it via my iMac, but no luck (it detects the device, but it doesn't show up on iTunes -- so how can I restore?). I've done my research and ended up with this idea: my iPod is dead. Now I'm just wondering -- after almost a year and a half of taking care of my iPod (by taking care, I mean proper ejecting, not dropping it, etc), why the sudden hard drive damage?
Please enlighten me.

Hard drives do fail over time. Even solid state drives will fail one day.
However, I once had a problem with an iPod Classic that I belive was caused by using the iPod as an external hard drive and I ended up taking it to the Genius Bar at the Apple Store. All the Genius did was plug it in to his computer and used some 3rd party application to force the iPod to restore again. And that was after I tried several things. So I suggest you take it to a Apple Genius if you can.
If you can't go to an Apple Store, I can look for that 3rd party Application.

Computer won't boot; no hard drive spin up; no target mode; refuses cd.

Our "other" house computer, an iMac 400 DV, vintage 1999, worked fine until just a little while ago. Last used this morning to send e-mail, it now will not boot. Hard drive does not spin up. After pushing power button, light (behind button) comes on, but no further activity ensues. Cannot be started in target disk mode. Utility CD cannot be inserted, either before or after pushing power button. My guess is that HD is "OK" (such as that is after 10 years), but that power is not getting to bus that drives it or CD drive.
How to find broken connection, if that what it is, is the problem.
Wise counsel or off the wall guesses are welcome.
Thanks.
Leonard
(p.s.: in one or more other forums, I posted questions in the last few months; subsequently I have been indisposed, as they say. My apologies to anyone who may have written with helpful tips and to whom I have not yet replied. I am way behind in correspondence and beg your indulgence until I can sit still long enough to type a few words in reply (hopefully after I've tried your suggestions).

Pismo is great. It's still my portable Mac, and as long as I don't try to play "HD" video in full screen mode on YouTube or Hulu, it is perfectly fine for most things I do. It still does not look old when I pull it out in a public place. Recent switchers with their MacBooks are probably wondering why the Apple logo is up-side-down.
My G4 card is the one that was sold by FastMac. 550 MHz. It is noticeably faster because Mac OS X and applications (such as for video processing) use the vector processing unit in the G4. But because the clock speed is not that different from the original 500 MHz G3, it's not a drastic end-to-end type of improvement.
When the CPU is being loaded to max, it does get hotter than the stock G3, so the fan comes on more often. The problem with today's Internet is the use of Flash animations in banner and sidebar ads. Those things put unnecessary load on my Pismo's CPU. For modern computers, that extra load is no big deal, but it matters to a 550 MHz G4. I would just turn Flash off, but there are things that I do want to see that use Flash.
I got it at the FastMac booth at the Macworld Expo a few years ago for the +show price+, so it has been worthwhile to have it.

Downloading a file would bring up an option to open the file or save it - for some reason now it just downloads straight to the download folder. Why? Problem with Firefox or something else?

Downloading a file would normally bring up an option to open the file with the appropriate program or save it - for some reason now it just downloads straight to the download folder. Why? Problem with Firefox or something else? It's very frustrating - sometimes you want the file opened first so it can be discarded or saved to a different location.

Hey. that's great! Thanks for posting back with the outcome.

Boot camp hard drive

I tried to install boot camp a couple months ago and shortly through the installation process(after setting up the hard drive) I realized the Windows disks I had weren't the correct ones, so I had to exit the installation... everything was fine. I just recently restarted my computer and noticed the "Boot camp" Hard drive was still on my desktop. How can I get rid of the boot camp hard drive?
thanks

Have you tried running Boot Camp again while in Leopard? This should allow you to delete the windows partition and restore both paritions to one as it once was.
Axel F.

V120 server boot from hard drive freezes

Hi
I just installed open solaris build 75 on a sun v120 server. After the instalation all went well and I configured the processes and users on the server just like I did yesterday on another v120. What i did afterwards that was different from yesterday is that I put the machine on standby by holding the power off (0) switch for a few seconds, then unpluged the power chord. After turning the power on again the server will freeze the boot process in the first 2 steps after it tries booting from hard drive. (It does pass all hardware checks). To comunicate with the server I connect a windows PC on the lom port with serial cable and the SecureCRT software. I tried to break into lom with #. after poweron but it doesn't seem to work. And the lom console in standby wont let me boot from cdrom or anything while in standby. Can anyone give me some guidance here? I don't have much experience with this kind of hardware.

Well, LOL, I did that prior to buying the software. It does meet the specifications. I found the solution on the support site. When I googled before I hadn't googled the error message verbatim. Doing so led me to this page: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3926 where I was instructed to create a tiny partition (128MB) and then run the installer again. No explanation was given as to why, but this did work and I am typing this via the new OS. Thanks for trying to help me baltwo! Best regards.

Hoe can I securely recycle iMac with blank screen - should I remove the hard drive, and anything else?

My iMac died after 8 years - blank screen, loud fan noise, no way to erase personal info. To recycle should I remove hard drive, and anything else?

Removing the hard drive should suffice. Use Google to find takeapart instruction, using you iMac's processor description in the search.
At eight years old, it is probably a G4 (the "desk lamp" style with an articulated display arm and white hemispherical base). So the search string would be "iMac G4 takeapart." If it turns out to be some other processor, simply substitute that processor (G3 or G5) for "G4."
The HD may not be bad, so you could keep it and connect to a newer Mac to retrieve files using this handy and inexpensive gadget:
Newer Technology Universal Drive Adapter - connects ATA/IDE/SATA to USB2 - 2.5", 3.5", 5.25" Drives

Boot Problems- Hard Drive Damaged? Something Else?

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