Can't boot from internal drive - Please help!

The internal drive on my PBG4 was making some funny noises this morning and sure enough, when I tried to reboot from it I was unable to. Instead I was brought to a screen with a DOS prompt with some cryptic error message. Since then I've called Apple support and their "solution" was to re-format the drive and reinstall the OS. I can do that if I absolutely have to, but if there's any way around it, I'd much rather avoid the reformatting/reinstalling everything nightmare scenario. Initially Disk Repair said the drive couldn't be repaired. I booted from my Disk Warrior CD (3.0.3), which prompted me to backup data (luckily I have an external 250GB drive) and I backed up my home directory. I did that and rebuilt the directory, then restarted from my Tiger CD and ran Disk utility again and it said the disk was fine. I tried to boot from the drive and I get taken to a DOS prompt again with the following error message:
launchd can't exec /bin/sh for single user: No such file or directory
Any suggestions on what I can try at this point short of reformatting the drive and starting over from scratch?
Powerbook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.7) 1.25 GHZ, 1GB Ram
Powerbook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.5) 1.25 GHZ, 1GB Ram

I assume you have OS X on a 2nd drive that you can run DW, Disk Utility etc.
As you backup files and know they are okay, delete them. Undo the layers of onion and try to go from latest to oldest.
If you don't have an emergency fw drive...
The trouble with long backups on a problem drive is they can fail during the backup if the drive gets too hot, which happens.
Back in Panther, you could use BootCD to create an emergency CD or DVD with your system, full finder, loads of utilities, and could even run FireFox. With that, you could run TTPro 4, Disk Warrior, DU, Rember etc. AND play around in the Finder and Terminal.
I still keep a CD and DVD with 10.3.9 just in case. The perfect FW drive would have a couple OS versions, a backup partition (that you can erase if needed).
Apple Disk Utility from CD/DVD can also be used to copy/clone a volume or foleer, using Restore and output to a volume or disk image.

Similar Messages

Z87-GD65 wont boot from any drive, please help!

I desperately need your help on this issue. And thanks in advance for any answer!
I have a brand new Z87-GD65 Mainboard.
When I select my boot device in BIOS all I get is: "Reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device and press a key"
In BIOS I can find all my hardware (CPU, Drives, HDDs, DVD,... RAM) everything is shown correctly. Nothing missing there, all parts shown by correct values.
I cant boot through my DVD Drive or external USB Drive (on both I have Windows 7 which I want to install on my new system). The Windows DVD is also working properly, I checked it on my old PC.
No matter what Boot priority/device I choose (I think Ive tried them all by now) "Reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device and press a key" is what I get after "save & reboot".
My BIOS Version is E7845IMS V1.8.
Any suggestions, what am I missing?
thank you very much for any help!

Quote from: Jimmy_123 on 09-May-14, 01:26:52
Ok, thanks for your help, I found the problem!
It was my DVD Rom Drive that could not read the DVD!!!!
What I Still dont understand is that it also didnt boot from a bootable HD through USB.
thanks for your help!
Glad you got it working....probably the controller got confused from the faulty DVD rom....

IMac G5 won't boot from CD drive, Please Help

My iMac G5 won't boot from the CD drive. There is no operating system on the hard drive so I want to install a fresh copy of Leopard. I have tried a couple different methods, but I keep getting the same end result. The first method I tried was booting from the CD drive by holding the C key during start up. The Leopard disc was automatically ejected after about 20-30 seconds. The second method I tried was booting the iMac to the "question mark file screen," which is when I inserted the Leopard disc. Usually on other Mac computers, this is when the computer will show the Apple logo and prompt you with the installation process. Not this iMac, it just ejects the disc shortly after I insert it. I'm not sure if it's the CD drive that is having the issue, the hard drive, or something else.
If you have any ideas, they would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you,
Chris

Where did you get the CD from?
If it is from another Mac, it is probably specific to the hardware in that Mac and is not capable of boot your iMac.
Allan

MacPro can't boot from external drive

Running 10.7.3 and a MacPro which gets backed up each night with SuperDuper. Can't boot from this drive (black screen). Yet I can take the same drive and start up my Macbook Pro! So it isn't the drive or the data on it. I'm stumped. Could this be related to an issue where I can't get this same MacPro or system to successfully backup to Time Machine without error? The boot drive seems OK (ran Disk Warrior and Disk Utility).

Please read this whole message before doing anything.
This procedure is a diagnostic test. It’s unlikely to solve your problem. Don’t be disappointed when you find that nothing has changed after you complete it.
The purpose of this exercise is to determine whether the problem is caused by third-party system modifications that load automatically at startup or login. Disconnect all wired peripherals except those needed for the test, and remove all aftermarket expansion cards. Boot in safe mode and log in to the account with the problem. The instructions provided by Apple are as follows:
Be sure your Mac is shut down.
Press the power button.
Immediately after you hear the startup tone, hold the Shift key. The Shift key should be held as soon as possible after the startup tone, but not before the tone.
Release the Shift key when you see the gray Apple icon and the progress indicator (looks like a spinning gear).
Safe mode is much slower to boot and run than normal, and some things won’t work at all, including wireless networking on certain Macs.
The login screen appears even if you usually log in automatically. You must know your login password in order to log in. If you’ve forgotten the password, you will need to reset it before you begin.
Test while in safe mode. Same problem(s)?
After testing, reboot as usual (i.e., not in safe mode.)

2 internal hdd's can't boot from thumb drive

I installed an SSD and a seagate SSD/HDD hybrid in the optical bay. I installed refit but I can't boot from a thumb drive and my superdrive doesn't act right, Is there firmware update or any kind of fixes anyone has seen heard or similar problem.
2010 mbp Intel ssd/momentus XT hybrid

cleaning the drive worked.

I can't boot from instalation disk need help

can anyone tell me why i can't boot from instalation disk
i burn a DVD with verified iso with MD5 with Nero Express

i use burn image , of course and
i have a Sempron +2400 with asus a7s8x mainboard
and i download all 5 file for DVD x86 and then i copy /b all this files.
when computer boot from cd the screen is bleu with Solaris ................ v.20 message and after 1 second message became
Aolaris ..................v.20 and computer remain in this position

Help! I Can't Boot from Firewire Drive (Previous MBP C2D Hard Drive)

Can a hardrive from a C2D Macbook Pro start an i7 Quad MBP?
I just sold my 2008 15" 2.4ghz C2D MBP, (that had 10.6.5 installed), and today bought the newest
17" 2.2ghz i7 Quad Core MBP, (that has 10.6.6 pre-installed.)
I installed a fresh HD on the 15" before selling it, and kept its HD, and put it into a FW800 enclosure.
+(note: The 15" Macbook Pro I just sold, booted fine from this HD in the FW800 enclosure.)+
Before migrating my data, from the FW800 drive, I figured I would upgrade the old OS to 10.6.6, so it would be a seamless migration.
While up and running on the brand new i7, I could see the FW800 drive with 10.6.5 as a Startup Disk option in System Preferences.
I rebooted holding down the option key, selected the FW drive, and pressed the arrow below to continue startup.
The grey screen with the apple came up immediately, but I was horrified that the spinning gear never did appear, and startup froze at that point. I left it like this for five minutes. Grey screen with apple. Frozen.
So, I held down the power key, shut it down, then restarted holding down Command-S to run Disk Utility in SIngle User Mode, (/sbin/fsck -fy). Disk was okay.
I rebooted into the new internal, installed Diskwarrior 4.3, and checked the FW800, and it had no errors.
I opened Startup Disk in System Preferences, and chose the FW800 drive as the Startup Disk, and rebooted. Same result. Grey screen with apple, and no further...
Can someone please help me troubleshoot this?
Should I be able to boot this new MBP i7 with the HD from my old MBP C2D?
Is there something incompatible between the old C2D and i7?
Thanks in advance!

Ho Lee MACkeral wrote:
That CD2 OS will not boot into a new computer's OS.
Hi, thanks for replying.
I knew that the switch to Intel from ppc, meant a ppc drive, partitioned with APM could not boot an intel machine with a GUID partition table.
Do you know:
1. for certain that a C2D HD cannot boot an i7 machine?
2. and why?
Ho Lee MACkeral wrote:
Why not use Migration Assistant in the Utilities folder?
I am planning on doing this.
My old drive was 10.6.5.
The new machine has 10.6.6 pre-installed.
I figured that if I was able to upgrade the old drive to the same OSX first, it would provide a more seamless migration.
I was also concerned that my applications on 10.6.5 might become broken if they were migrated to 10.6.6. I really do not want to have to install everything.

Help! Can't Boot from Internal or External HD

My Powerbook is almost 4 years old (purchased Oct 05). Last October, right before my AppleCare warranty expired, I sent it in for repairs. Apple outdid itself. They replaced the display, the logic board, the optical drive, the battery and the charger. I was a very happy camper! In March 09, I accidentally dropped my PowerBook on its edge. The display was damaged -- black "ink spots" appeared on all corners and other places. Because I was not ready to buy a new computer, I kept using it. But the damage in the display slowly kept spreading throughout the screen.
About four weeks ago, the screen damage spread to about 2/3rds of the screen. I no longer could use it. So I borrowed an old LCD display and used the VGA adapter that came with the PowerBook to hook it up to the display. This was working great up until a couple of days ago, when I tried to boot up and, nothing. The computer began to go through the start up process but then it froze. Nothing showed up on the external display. But after shutting down and booting up several times, I was able to get it to boot up completely.
Today, I have been working all day to get the PowerBook to boot up. No luck. It just starts, you hear the "tada" and then nothing. I even tried several times to boot up from my external firewire HD by pressing the option key while starting. I have a Super Duper Clone on the external HD. Nothing, I could boot up. I am at my wits end! I intend on buying a new MacBook Pro, but I can't for about 2-3 more weeks. I don't know if I have internal damage in the PowerBook or if these are issues related to the recent OS update.
Anyone, please help right away!!
torinogiorgio

Part of the problem is that I can't see anything on my display, so I have to rely on the external LCD display. When I boot up by pressing the option key, I here "tada." The tiny part of the PowerBook's display I can see lights up dark gray, and then nothing else happens. Nothing at all on the external screen. The same thing happens if I boot up in Safety Mode (by pressing the Shift Key). I tried booting up with my external firewire HD, as well as using my TechTool Pro CD, and the same thing happens. It seems the boot up process just stops. Now my TechTool Pro CD is in my PowerBook and I can't get it out.
Help! What should I do?
torinogiorgio

IMac won't boot from internal drive (Disk Ult can't see drive)

Yesterday morning my iMac (early 2006) froze while watching a movie. I figured it was because I was running so many things in the background (Safari, iTunes, iPhoto, Mail, iCal and Preview). So I restarted the unit by holding down the power button cause it wouldn't responded to any keyboard prompts, tho it did allow me to use the mouse. So I restarted and got a grey screen showing a folder and a question mark. i unplugged the system for a few minutes and started her up again. This time it showed the gray apple but it had a progress bar on the bottom like it was loading something. The system started and took me to the login screen. Just to be safe i restarted it from the login screen. the system booted up fine and i finished watching my movie. I came back from the gym like 2 hrs later and tried to wake my mac from sleep mode and got the usual prompt to enter my password to unlock the screen. As i started to enter my password the screen froze again. This time tho i was unable to restart the unit. i kept getting that grey screen with the folder and question mark. So iI popped in my 10.6 install disk to see if I could repair the HDD. But no matter how many times i try the system does not pick up my internal drive. I'm not really sure what the problem is. I thought it might be hardware failure, but I didn't have this problem until after the latest software update. And the drive never gave me any indication of problems before yesterday. All i can think is that the system update or safari update corrupted something or is not playing nice with something already on the system. But i guess that wouldn't explain the drive not being seen. Can anybody offer and ideas of a solution? I really just wanna get it up so I can salvage my iTunes folder and transfer it to my Macbook.
HELP

Hi MacBoy84
Sure sounds like the HD is worn out, damaged, failing or failed and needs to be replaced.
Take it to your local Authorized Apple Service Provider and have them put a new WD Caviar Blue or Seagate Barracuda 3.5 SATA HD in it. > http://www.apple.com/buy/locator/service/
Given the choice I would choose a WD Caviar Blue, they seem to run a little cooler and quieter than the WD Blacks and most Seagate's. http://www.wdc.com/en/products/index.asp?cat=3
As for your iTunes Library that depends, some times just before an HD totally fails it is possible to copy the data off of it. Unfortunately most of the time when it's gone it's gone for good and needs to be sent out to a professional data recovery service, you do have a Time Machine backup on an External HD right?
Dennis

Can't boot from internal hard drive.

I just replaced my internal hard drive and copied the back-up from the old drive onto the new one. The new drive appears to be properly formatted and to contain all the data I copied to it, but I am unable to boot from it. Any advice? Thanks!

Thanks, Courcoul. I went back and formatted the drive again, this time booting from the OSX installation CD. (Last time I booted from the back-up drive from which I was copying.) I don't know if it was booting from the CD and not the drive, or that I didn't format it properly the first time, but this did the trick. Working perfectly.

How can I boot from Clone Drive?

I believe that I am having some problems with my boot drive, and I would like to boot up my system using the boot drive I created with Carbon Copy Cloner, which is on another internal HDD within my tower. I would like to boot with that cloned copy, but have forgotten how to do it. My boot drive is a SSD drive, and appears to be working well, but disk permissions showed many errors, most of which I was able to repair with repair disk permissions, but not all of them. Any help and/or direction is greatly appreciated.

System Preferences > Startup Disk ...
... will show all Volumes it thinks it can boot from. Set to whichever one you want.
That presumes your Mac is booted up and System preferences is working.
If not, hold down the Option key at Startup.
You get a display of all bootable Volumes, and the Eject key is "live" once they are all drawn.

Can't Boot From External Drive

Situation:
Prior to upgrading to Lion I used SuperDuper to create a copy of the existing internal hard drive on an new external drive (iOmega eGo 500GB).
Tested booting from the external disk and it appeared to work correctly.
Upgraded to Lion.
Several days later attempted to boot from the external disk (by setting the start up disk in the system preferenes ) but it fails.
The system always boots into Lion.
What I've tried:
Setting the start up disk through system preferences
Holding down the option key to select a disk on startup - interestingly enough I only see the internal hard disk and a recover HD. No sign of my external disk.
Using a clean partition on the external hard drive I installed SL from the retail DVD. This produces the same effect of system booting to Lion on the internal drive, which suggests that the problem is not related to the copy I made using SuperDuper, but rather has to do with the external drive or something in Lion that prevents using an external drive (but I've never heard of such a thing).
Talked to technical support at Apple since I had newly purchased Lion. They couldn't offer a solution but did give a lot of thought and suggestions - but they don't support booting from an external disk.
Talked to iOmega technical support. Not helpful but did figure out at the end of an online chat that they don't support their disks being used for external booting.
Emailed SuperDuper. Very helpful. They offered some suggestions but in the end these didn't work.
Characteristics
Lion 10.7.4
iMac 2007
External Drive Interface FW800
I'd appreciate any suggestions as to the cause of the problem and possible fixes.
Thanks

@shootist007
Still no success but more information:
I found the USB cable for the drive, connected it to a powered USB hub (note that there are two cables going into the hub that must merge and go into a single connector for the USB interface on the drive). with both cables plugged in I still can't get the external drive to boot.
I need to do one more experiment on this. The hub is fully loaded so I'll try removing as much load as possible on the USB to see if I can get it to work.
Regarding your question, there is no way to get power to the drive. (Now I think about it, the design is for a portable drive that you can carry around with you so iOmega aimed the design at not needing a power supply to make it very portable). Hmmm, didn't think about that when I purchased it.
If reducing the load on the hub doesn't make it work then I'l have to get a replacement drive with its own power supply.
Thanks for your help. Even though no success yet I suspect you've identified the problem.

Macbook 2012 not booting from internal drive but booting from external usb drive

hi everyone!!
here is what happened:
i have worked all day on my macbook pro, normally. when i got home and turned it on (i always power it off for rolling with it) it just didn't load the OS.
i run mavericks on a i7 mid 2012 macbook pro 13". it had an accident on last december and fell on the ground, but i've changed the hdd and it worked normally until last week when this happened.
i have a copy of my system on a usb drive and tried to start up from it and it worked.
i took my hdd from inside the lap top and started from it (yes, the same hard disk that was inside the machine) and it worked.
i took the macbook to an apple store and the "apple genius" that was there started up my machine from inside with another hdd running yosemite that they have in the store for testing.
today i bought a new hdd and put it in. but i can't format it or install the system. i had these 2 errors on disk utility
"partition failed with the error: wiping volume data to prevent future accidental probing failed"
and
"restore failure an error (32) occurred while copying. (broken pipe)
so:
it loads from my internal drive, but only when its connected via usb
it loaded the apple store drive internally
it does not format my new drive nor install the system on it
ANY suggestions, please??? it's really difficult to me to solve this problem...
thanks a lot!!!

Must be a bad SATA cable undetected by Apple Techs. A result of the drop but they are also quite fragile.
Disturbing the cable can cause it to work for a while. Cheap repair at iFixIt.

Macbook Pro will not boot from internal drive

I have a macbook pro model indentifier: macbookpro 7,1. The system would not boot what I have tried is first running apple diagnostics and all test fine, I tried booting from a snow leopard cd to re-install and it would not boot from the cd, however it does boot from the techtool pro 6 cd. I did run the test in techtool pro and all check out ok.
I removed the drive from the system and connected via usb to test and it boots fine from usb, put back internal and same result no boot. I did some research and I see that someone had a similar problem and it was the sata cable, but since the diagnostics test ok I am not sure that would be the problem.
Any Suggetions, this is driving me crazy
Thanks in advance
Bret

coffee would not HAVE to do anything except mechanically. It would not have any effect now since it has dried out, well short of corroding some components.
Check the points where the HDD casing "meets" the Macbook casing. How much pressure is there?
What about the pressure pins "pogo pins" are they all functioning?
What about pressure on the cables?
Please describe how it wont boot? What exactly does it do / happens

Can't boot from firewire drive

Howzit,
I have partitioned an OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro 1.5 TB firewire drive into 2 partitions using Disk Utility and GUID mapping. I then used Carbon Copy Clone to clone the startup disk of my MacPro, which runs OS 10.4.11. The clone successfully boots when it is connected to the MacPro.
The problem is that I am unable to boot from the firewire drive when I hook it up to my iMac. When I restart and hold the OPTION key, the clone appears as a startup option, but the computer freezes when I click on it. The clone also shows up as an option in the Startup Disk preference, but when I try restarting after selecting the clone, it freezes the same way: gray screen, no apple, no rotating gear.
Can you help?

Make an OS partition then for each. Or, upgrade your Mac Pro to SL as well. Unless there is software holding you to Tiger.
Now, when SL came out, I know I saw a lot of threads regarding issues booting from external firewire drives, so you may not be 100% out of the woods, but you should.
I'd expect to get a panic screen from 10.4, lacks any support for newer hardware / graphics card and more.

Can't boot from internal drive - Please help!

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for