Hard drive is corrupt, no recovery mode.

I can't get pat the startup screen and I've immediately jumped to the conclusion that my hard drive is corrupt. It won't let me boot up in safe mode, and I tried to go into recovery mode to find that it would not let me. When I pressed option at startup it shows that there us not a recovery partition.
if the hard drive has failed, this would be the third time in less than six months. Is there a bigger problem? Or am i really just having bad luck with the hard drives?
The last time my hard drive failed i replaced it and recovered lion from the online apple support since i don't have an installation disc anymore. Is this why there is no more recovery partition?
Basically, I'm stuck. Is there anything i can do right now, I'm lost.
I can't take it in either, my warranty is up and I'm a broke college student working unpaid internships. :/

I suspect that either there is an underyling issue that Apple has been overlooking over the past three six months. Either way, take it in and have them run a their diagnostics test on it. The drive is covered for 90 days, by the way, when Apple replaces it. So, if this drive was replaced within the last three months and Apple determines physical failure, your 4th (don't think I've ever said your 4th replacement drive) will be covered by Apple.
Unless you have a tendency to drop your machine once a week, it is unlikely a case of misusing the HDD repeatedly. Third party software and user modifications could repeatedly cause logical failure of the volume, but not repeated physical failure of the disk.
DO take it in. If you end up being charged, explain to them this is your 4th drive in 6 months. Ask to speak to the manager. Apple's terms and conditions are not statutes. The manager can issue you a free replacement at his own discretion.
As for...
"I'm a broke college student working unpaid internships. :/"
Right there with you, except I'm a broke post-grad currently sitting around responding to Apple support forums.
Best of luck.

Similar Messages

HT4718 Is it possible to back up files onto an external hard drive while in internet recovery mode?

This morning, upon starting up my MacBook, I was greeted with the lovely gray screen. I'm in internet recovery mode and have attempted to repair my disk, but it's too damaged according to the disk utility. So, I'm going to have to reinstall OS X Lion. I'm worried about losing my files and bought a 500gb external hard drive in hopes that I can back up my files while in recovery mode and then erase and reinstall the operating system
Any help would be much appreciated!

There are several ways to back up a Mac that is unable to fully boot. You need an external hard drive to hold the backup data.
1. Boot into Recovery (command-R at startup; 10.7 or later), from a local Time Machine backup volume (option key at startup; 10.7.2 or later), or from your installation disc (C key at startup; 10.6.8 or earlier.) Launch Disk Utility and follow the instructions in the support article linked below, under “Instructions for backing up to an external hard disk via Disk Utility.”
How to back up and restore your files
2. If you have access to a working Mac, and both it and the non-working Mac have FireWire or Thunderbolt ports, boot the non-working Mac in target disk mode by holding down the key combination command-T at the startup chime. Connect the two Macs with a FireWire or Thunderbolt cable. The internal drive of the machine running in target mode will mount as an external drive on the other machine. Copy the data to another drive. This technique won't work with USB, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth.
How to use and troubleshoot FireWire target disk mode
3. If the internal drive of the non-working Mac is user-replaceable, remove it and mount it in an external enclosure or drive dock. Use another Mac to copy the data.

Hard drive not showing in Recovery Mode?

My friend's laptop that is running Lion refuses to start. It gets stuck on the loading screen. I tried booting into recovery mode to re-install Lion but the only drive that appears to install the operating system onto is the recovery mode partition itself. The main harddrive shows up using recovery mode's disk utility, but it can't be modified in any way. Trying to reformat it returns an error message saying "Failed to unmount disk" or something like that.
Any help would be appreciated!
I have another thread with this topic that has more infomation here:
Macbook stuck on load screen, recovery mode unhelpful?

Does the drive show up in Disk Utilities? Try a restart. Are you getting any error messages?
http://superuser.com/questions/449534/osx-cant-create-a-partition-because-drive- is-locked

Hard drive is corrupt after i repair it

My hard drive reads corrupt after I repair it. I restart it, hit C, and open it with a startup disk, then repair and restart it. After a while, when I verify my disk, it says that is corrupt, AGAIN!!
Please help
I'm running a mac pro dual core 2 2.66 intel xeon processor, with 16GB of memory My operating system is 10.6,8

So you should have already made a couple backups, always have a spare bootable system drive, and in some cases zero it all - takes couple hours, and not use it except as spare extra backup.
Getting files off your drive now but don't use it,, install OS to a new drive (pull the old one in fact temporary) and you may want to use checksum on all file copies, and for any files not on backup sets try best you can and if you still need help, then turn to Data Rescue 3.
I would not use a DVD to do repairs, even if it is 10.6.0 or 10.6.3. I would use a clean small system drive with 10.6.8 (takes less than 30GB, even down to 16GB if careful) "emergency boot drive" used only for system maintenance and repairs.
And if you had Lion, you don't, but, I would use Recovery Mode AND have that also cloned to another drive, using Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC).

A library on my hard drive became corrupted, so I over-wrote it from an external hard drive. When I access the library now on my hard drive, many of the images are vertical, and cannot be rotated other than one at a time. Ideas to correct this?

A library on my hard drive became corrupted, so I over-wrote it from an external hard drive. When I now access the library on my hard drive, many of the images are vertical, and cannot be rotated other than one at a time. Ideas to correct this?

You had already done "Repair" and "Rebuild"? These usually takes scores of minutes or hours.
Does the Library on your external drive work from the external drive? Navigate to it in Finder and double-click the name.
If it does, delete the problem Library, empty the System Trash, reboot, Verify your system disk using Disk Utility (and might as well repair permissions while you're at it), reboot, test the external drive Library once more to confirm it works properly, then close it and copy the Library to your system drive. When the copying is done, double-click the Library (now on the system drive) and see what you get.

New Hard Drive for HP DV6 & Recovery Issues

Greetings everyone... Happy Holidays to all!
As luck would have it, on the first day of the Holiday break, my wife's laptop hard drive decided to go on strike - luckily, I could mount the hard drive on another system and get most of the files off that were needed. In replacing the hard drive and doing my research on the web and on these forums, it appears there is a fair amount of disparity between those having success and complete failure when running the recovery disks after a hard drive failure and, thus far, I am in the second camp (not going as smoothly as advertised). As a side note, I created the recovery disks from the system upon receiving it and the disks were verified as part of the creation process as being 'good.'
I am working on an HP Pavillion DV6t, product number XC100AV that originally shipped with a WD Scorpio Blue 640GB drive (WD6400BEVT, 5400 rpm). We have had this system about 13-14 months (just past that 12 month warranty period) and the system is very lightly used (nightly facebook'ing is about as strenuous as this system has worked). Since I have a high degree of experience and confidence in working with computers, I didn't have any reservations in going down to the nearest electronics retailer and picking up a new drive to put into the machine. I picked up a Seagate Momentus XT drive (500GB, 4GB SSD hybrid, 7200 rpm) and put it into the machine in a few minutes, adjusted the BIOS settings to boot from the CD drive and disable the HP Web flash capability, and proceeded to load the CDs through the HP system recovery manager. The system progresses through the recovery manager without incident or error (indicating the recovery disks are 'good'). However, when booting the system after the recovery CDs complete, I get the nice message that no boot file can be found. This tells me that there is no MBR (master boot record) created during the system recovery process and there is no way to boot into the operating system.
Given this information, I have a few questions to those experienced in this area:
1. Am I required to contact HP to purchase a new hard drive to get the recovery to work properly? To put it another way, is there an HP 'tatoo' (as alluded to in other posts around the Internet) that would prevent me from using a HDD that is technically compatible?
2. If the answer(s) to #1 is no, what am I missing in getting the recovery to work properly? Are there any MBR utilities that I should use in addition to the recovery processes outlined by HP?
3. Am I required to purchase the same HDD (size, manufacturer)? I decided to stay away from WD after it failed after only 13 months of light use...
Thank you in advance for your advice!

You're very welcome.
That happened to me too (after testing windows 8), and the only way I was able to get W7 back on my PC was to install XP, and have it format the drive. I let XP install and didn't bother installing any drivers.
I booted from the W7 disk and it worked without incident.
You have to have advanced knowledge to install XP on a modern notebook, because you need to know how to install the necessary sata drivers in order for XP to even see the drive.
I noticed that MS has re-established the W7 ISO file download links again in the last day, so see if you can make your own disk again and try using that to install windows and then try to use the recovery disks if you want.
http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/14709-Windows-7-Digital-River-direct-links-Multiple-Languag...

My old hard-drive has corrupted and i have lost my library. i lost my back up too. I have restored all my purchased stuff but had 5000 songs uploaded from my CD collection. Is there anyway of transferring the CD tracks from my ipod or ipod to my iMac?

My old hard-drive has corrupted and i have lost my library. i lost my back up too. I have restored all my purchased stuff but had 5000 songs uploaded from my CD collection. Is there anyway of transferring the CD tracks from my ipod or ipod to my iMac? Or do I have to manually upload the CDs again?

Hi,
See if this doc helps https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3991
Jim

On a macbook I purchased secondhand hard drive got corrupted and I started to get the flashing folder with the question mark, I purchased a new hard drive and snow lion install DVD I installed the hard drive and tried disc but kept getting blinking folder

On a macbook I purchased secondhand hard drive got corrupted and I started to get the flashing folder with the question mark, I purchased a new hard drive and snow lion install DVD I installed the hard drive and tried disc but kept getting blinking folder

Welcome to Apple Support Communities. We're users here and do not speak for "Apple Inc."
Power on the computer and insert the DVD immediately.
Hold down the 'C' key to boot from the Snow Leopard DVD.
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1533
After selecting the appropriate language, if necessary, select Utilities, and Disk Utility.
You'll likely need to partition and format the new drive before it's recognized.
http://manuals.info.apple.com/MANUALS/0/MA161/en_US/MacBook_13inch_HardDrive_DIY .pdf
(Yes, these instructions ARE 7 years old, but the procedure is the same for installing from DVD media.)

TS1367 n't help me. anyone have any clue if this could mean me hard drive is corrupt or quit working. this model does not come with a disk or small drive t

i have a macbook air and thos model does not come with a flas or disk to reinstall the operating system when i turn it on i get a transparent grey rolldown saying turn your computer on. does anyone have any thoughts if the hard drive is corrupt or gone out? geek squad cant help.

Can you access the drive when you connect it to another computer?

FYI: Corrupt hard drive will cause target disk mode to fail

I have just finished restoring my nephew's iBook which had had a major disk corruption issue - keys out of order, invalid key lengths, etc. in the catalog. While the iBook would boot, it had a lot of problems running due to the corrupt file system.
As part of the restoration process, I tried to connect the iBook in target disk mode, but had a lot of trouble. Apparently, bad file system data structures will cause the target disk mode to hang; I needed to disconnect the iBook from my main system to get out of the SPOD. In the end, I booted the iBook from the installation DVD and ran Disk Utility from there to reformat the hard drive. Surprisingly, it was impossible to reformat the drive in target disk mode due to the corruption.
Once the disk was reformatted, target disk mode worked fine, and I was able to restore the entire system (less files lost due to the corruption) in that mode.

It is impossible to say what can be recovered without knowing the cause of the installation failure. The possibilities range from some interfering third party addition to the previously installed OS to a substandard or degraded hardware component (especially RAM) that can't meet the more stringent demands of the new OS version.
All I can suggest is to try Target Disc Mode & see what you can recover to another drive -- one that your bother should have had for backups to begin with & should now see the value of having if he did not before.
If that doesn't work, the alternatives are investing in special data recovery software (moderately expensive) or a data recovery service (very, very expensive).

Hard Drive Failure and Data Recovery

I am pretty sure I am SOL - but thought I'd try one last "Hail Mary" before throwing in the towel - to see if anyone here might have a solution I haven't thought of or am not aware of:
My wife's Macbook wouldn't boot today - instead she was greeted by the dreaded blinking question mark.
Macbook (2006) 4 gb ram - OSX 10.6.6 120GB internal HD (the internal HD is the problem).
I shut it down and attached a USB external HD that has a copy of OSX on it and it booted fine - but the internal HD would not mount. I tried both Drive Genius and Disk Warrior - neither program sees the damaged hard drive. I then launched Disk Utility - it sees the damaged HD as an UNINITIALIZED disk - and the only options are to initialize it - all the repair options are grayed out.
So I went poking around on the net looking for hard drive problems that the leading disk recovery programs can not fix and stumbled on to a thread discussing invalid sibling links - which is apparently the Achilles Heal of the OSX HFS file system - and can render the data on a HD inaccessible.
The thread went on to discuss a possible fix by running a series of fsck_hfs commands from the terminal window - or if the HD will mount - via single user mode or verbose login. Other options included attaching the problem Mac to another Mac via Target Disk Mode and many had success being able to see and repair the drive that way.
If anyone is interested in the details of this fix you can sift through this thread on Mac OSX Hints:
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20070204093925888
Unfortunately for me - nothing is working. The only way I can get Disk Utility to see the damaged drive is if I boot from the external USB HD. And As I mentioned above - Disk Utility only sees it as an uninitialized drive.
If I attach the Macbook to my MacPro in Target Disk Mode - the Macbook starts up in TDM but of course the HD never mounts on my MacPro and neither Disk Utility, Drive Genius or Disk Warrior are able to see the damaged macbook drive - in TDM none of these programs even show that the physical drive exists.
So, short of re-initializing the drive and thus loosing all the data - anyone out there in cyber space have any suggestions?
Thanks!

Just an update and a new question - I decided to go ahead a reformat the drive - but Disk Utility is giving me the following error message:
Disk Erase Failed with Error:
POSIX reports: The operation couldn't be completed.
Cannot allocate memory.
So, does this sound like a hardware problem as oppossed to just a corrupted file system?
Thanks!

TM - External Disk Drive Not Detected in Recovery Mode

Hello Apple Lovers,
I am using the My Passport for Mac 500GB disk drive with time machine on my MacBook Air to create data backups.
I checked the disk for any corruption using Disk Utility. No issues were found. I find the disk works excellantly in terms of creating backups and restoring them inside time machine.
I cannot detect my external disk for restoring entire images of the OSx in recovery mode. For some reason, TM will not detect my backup disk in the recovery mode. I use the WD Security software on my disk to lock it, however, never before has the security lock posed any problem to me. I used to see a prompt appear for me to unlock the drive in recovery mode on attempting to access the TM backups.
Please take your time in replying to my post. I recovered my entire system last week and restored all the data using TM's twlight view. No rush! I successfully created a backup of my fresh OSx Mavericks on the MacBook Air with all the data restored using TM. I only wanted to troubleshoot this issue in case something occurs in the future that may require me to restore data using TM in recovery mode.
I browsed extensively through many of the discussions covering Time Machine. None mentioned my particular dilemma. Any assistance would be a valuable controbution not only to me, but other Apple users who may purchase My Passport for Mac drives and encounter a similiar problem.

megaram wrote:
I use the WD Security software on my disk to lock it, however, never before has the security lock posed any problem to me. I used to see a prompt appear for me to unlock the drive in recovery mode on attempting to access the TM backups.
You will need to avoid using third party software if you hope to access the disk and data in recovery mode.
If the WD software encrypts your data recovery mode will need a way to decrypt it. Recovery mode is a 'reduced mode' that only runs Apple software (not third party software) so the WD drivers that decrypt the disk will not be installed & Disk Utility or Migration Assistant will not be able to open the data on the disk.
There have been long threads that make me steer clear of using ANY Western Digital drive software with 10.9.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5475136?start=0&tstart=0
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-6202 <- WD had to remove software from Macs because it ruined peoples data on 10.9.
There are other threads on WD disk tools causing errors on 10.9, external hard disks do not require the use of additional software on OS X - these apps & drivers are mostly junk that is not a good idea to install.
If you really want to protect your data with encryption the features are already built in to OS X, it's called Filevault. It will encrypt your internal HD & your Time Machine backups (when the OS is encrypted). It works with Apple tools & doesn't rely on any third party drivers.
You will need to disable the 'WD security lock' and make sure the disk works without the WD software if you hope to have any chance of reading it in recovery mode.

Kernel panic - hard drive or corrupt journal system?

Hi,
My powerbook G4 shut down today with a kernel panic and now won't boot up (giving a kernel panic error after reaching the gray screen). The computer has been working fine, though the battery has run down, with the exception of not shutting down properly (I would have to power off manually). I tried various things to fix this (repair permissions, check hard drive, checking logs, etc.), but all those checked out and I could never get it figured out. I have been leaving the computer running because of this and it has been working fine. It is a stock G4 with no peripherals, except for a 1 GB RAM upgrade. The RAM was installed two years ago and tested strenuously with memtest with no issues.
I did have my hard drive near full, as I didn't realize that this could case severe issues. It's probably too full to do a clean Archive and Install. My fault.
I have reset my PMU/PRAM, but the computer won't boot up in safe mode or single-user mode. I get the following message at the end of single-user mode:
Kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 8.11.0: Wed Oct 10 18:26:00 PDT 2007: root:xnu-792.24.17~1/RELEASE_PPC
panic: We are hanging here ...
Unfortunately, I do not have my backup disks with me right now, as I recently moved (I will have them in a couple weeks).
There's some data on the computer it would be nice to pull off, but not absolutely essential. So my question is: Does this sound like a hard drive problem or a journal system/file system problem or something else? I hear no strange noises from the drive (the fan is a little noisy, though). What can I do at this point while I wait for my discs to arrive from across country?
If this is a file problem, I have heard these are difficult to fix or even deal with in terms of data recovery, since the disk won't mount even in firewire target mode. Should I invest in a firewire external drive in order to create a bootable second drive? Purchase DiskWarrior? Create a bootable Linux CD? Any help would be appreciated!

darksurtur:
If you have the original HDD with which the computer was bought you likely have a failed HDD and should have it replaced with a newer, faster and large capacity HDD. The average life of an internal HDD is 3 to 5 years, and although it may not suddenly stop functioning after that performance gradually decreases until the drive fails completely.
A too full drive can cause serious directory corruption which can in turn lead to data corruption and possible loss, and eventually a crash. You should maintain a minimum of 15% to total disk capacity (5 GB minimum on HDDs of 40 GB or less) as contiguous free space to allow for swap files and directory expansion.
You should always maintain a current backup of everything you do not wish to lose as even a new HDD can fail suddenly. Using an external firewire drive and making a bootable clone using a utility like SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner is an excellent way to accomplish this. Dr. Smoke's FAQ Backup and Recovery has excellent tips on backup strategies.
Please do post back if you have further questions or comments.
cornelius

Itunes backed up on external hard drive now corrupt

My 2000+ songs were backed up on an external hard drive. It suddenly gave me a corrupt error message. Ran the check disk. It advised me that I needed to /fix to correct problem, but it wouldn't accept that command. Went to Geek Squad & they tell me drive is empty, but for a fee they can send it off for more extensive recovery. For whatever reason, some of my iTunes files are also on my 13-year-old Windows drive, but not all. It's random music, too. Some recently purchased, some not. Trying to explain this to an Apple person has proven to be difficult. I had already tried all the "tricks" they have suggested.
Half of my library is "purchased" music, but trying to retrieve them from the iTunes Store is not happening. It still thinks they are downloaded. The songs that get the exclamation points then clear when I exit iTunes & then restart it. Then when I try to play them I get the exclamation point.
Any other advice?
Thanks!

I honestly thought they were backed up, along with a few hundred pictures. I actually went in and manually did a back-up a couple of months ago, because it didn't appear that it was following the schedule & auto-backing up. I'm just a 55 y/o, non-computer-literate mom, who now has adult children & am doing this computer thing on my own!! My computer is really old. Bought it when Windows ME came out!! HA! Saving for a new one, but our daughter's wedding this summer got in the way.
I thought about the delete-thing. Wasn't sure if that would work. Going to try (test) that now.
Thanks for your quick response & help.

2TB Ext. Hard Drive is corrupted?, error code -50 and then error code -35 when i try to empty out my trash

okay so a few days ago i received and email for one of my colleagues to do some final editing to a music video. the folder contained 2 videos a rough chops and the main which was about 2-3GB which i dragged on to my external hard drive . and at the time i was trying to install a trial version of parallel lines and me being a newbie to the software i didn't know i need windows installments for it to run lol but yeah... so i was just getting frustrated with the software i kept installing it uninstalling it and then i was thinking my the problem might be because my MacHD space is low (less then 40GBs on my MacHD), so.. i installed it on my hard drive where all my important files are (I'm a graphic designer and do light video editing) video projects and many photoshop projects form 2007 and logs and just a bunch of important files in my hard drive. so because i was so frustrated with the software i wasn't thinking and i installed it on my external 2TB hard drive. and when i realized parallel wasn't working i gave up, uninstalled the program form the hard drive and for some reason when i did that and i tried opening the video my friend had email to me and for some reason it did load up but a few seconds maybe about 10sec in the video is froze and closed my media app (VLC) and when i tried opening other video files it would freeze every few minutes but those specific files i had drag in last were not playing after at least 5 secs and eventually didn't open at all so i restart my computer login and now i get scared i see that my MacBook Pro isn't reading my external hard drive so i search threw forums... i unplug from the wall plug my external hard drive back in my computer and it loaded up but when i opened my external hard drive all my files had that plank white paper icon on my folders (because i have everything organized but subject when you open then drive folder. so... i go in to my projects and nothing, i open my edited photos and nothing... my hart feels like its about to drop and i keep opening files and there is nothing in them, but in "get info" of my drive it shows that there is filled so i go to "disk utility"... i "verify disk" passes ..."repair disk" doesn't past.... i look it up in forums... so i reboot my computer and go to the safe recovery menu. go threw the same ting "disk utility"... verify, pass... repair, pass... so now i feel relieved. i login files in the ext. hard drive load up i tried again to open the files and same thing happens... so now I'm thinking its the files i drag the files to the trash and try to empty and its gone i reboot the computer and my drive didn't load up so i tried unplugin it and back in... drive comes up i notice theres trash.. i tried emptying it and i get the error code -50. and no files are popping up on my external drive and i try to repair/unmount disk and the verify disk doesn't pass and when i click repair disk it doesn't past and another error code pops up -35.... so i felt my drive alone for a few days and yesterday i go the files deleted from the trash and now I'm not getting any codes but when i try to unmount.verify/repair the disk. keeps letting my tits need to be repaired so i click the repair button another error unable to unmount volume to repair...
what do i do? my files still don't show up. and I'm very sorry for the long paragraph but i have to be detailed for you to understand my situation

Read this.

Hard drive is corrupt, no recovery mode.

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