Recently, I had to go through this process to work out what to do when my friend’s Macbook wouldn’t start.
Here’s a reminder of the things I tried:
- Start in Safe Mode. Do this by holding down the Shift key while starting. Release Shift when you see the Apple logo and this spinning thing.
- Start in Single User mode. Do this by holding down Command-S while you start your Mac. This should bring you to a terminal. The first thing to try is fsck -f to see how many problems there are. (You can do fsck -fy which will run fsck and fix any problems automatically, but you may cause serious problems if your disk has major issues. Be careful if you choose this option and understand what you’re doing!) Run this repeatedly until no further problems are reported.
- Start your Mac with the OS X disk in the drive. If you have a drive with a tray, hold down the left-mouse button while starting to eject it. If not, insert it as soon as possible. Either way, hold down the ‘C’ key while booting until the apple logo and the spinning thing shows up. Then, go to Utilities, Disk Utilities. Choose to Repair Disk and keep doing this until there are no more errors. Once this has happened, click on Repair Permissions to fix those too.
- If you have no luck with either of the above, then boot your machine in target disk mode by holding down the T button during boot until the Apple logo and spinning thing show up. Then connect it to a working Mac and run step 3 from the working Mac. Consider backing up the failing Mac from the good one at this point. At least you’ll get your data back.
- Call Apple or take it into one of their stores.
Leave a Reply