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ducatigirl

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 10, 2008
6
0
my 6 month old macbook froze today while looking at the net so i used the hard reboot and now all i get is a grey screen. no icon no nothing. i cant get to safe mode. i cant reboot from OS CD's. if i hold down the shift of C key for long enough i get a pic of a flashing folder with a ? in the center of the screen. any ideas of how to get my stuff reboot it and get my folders off the harddrive?
 
This means it cannot find a boot disk.

this could be from one of 2 things, either

faulty motherboard
faulty HDD

either way i suggest that you keep trying to boot the computer and you may be lucky enough to get it to boot at some time and quickly recover critical data of the hdd incase it is the hdd

you can also FW boot and try to extract that way, but again it can have issues.


i have had this issue personally twice on my 12" powerbook 1.33, and a 1st gen macbook.

Twice it was the HDD and once the Logic board. unfortunately for me it was the logic board this year well past the warranty.
 
no first try to firewire boot, so just connect it to another computer via firewire and then boot and hold down F and it should have a big firewire sign on the screen, if the drive wont mount then it looks like your drives wrong. if it does then its the logic board.

if you don't try to retrieve the data you will most probably lose everything when apple deal with the computer
 
thanks for the advise. have a friend with a macpro so will hook it up to his and see if i can save all my data. im hoping its a hardware prob coz then apple have to fix it for nothing. was not impressed with their your out of software support warrenty so pay up for us to help you. too bad if it is hardware.
 
If you have a friend who has a Mac you could connect them up via Firewire (Target Disk Mode), restart by holding down T and then transfer the data off your Mac (which should be read like an external HD), but if it is only 6 months old a visit to the Mac Store could be in order (if it is not too far).

my 6 month old macbook froze today while looking at the net so i used the hard reboot and now all i get is a grey screen. no icon no nothing. i cant get to safe mode. i cant reboot from OS CD's. if i hold down the shift of C key for long enough i get a pic of a flashing folder with a ? in the center of the screen. any ideas of how to get my stuff reboot it and get my folders off the harddrive?
 
not sure if they will be that helpful but will try the mac store if getting my data off using my mates mac doesnt work. just tried rebooting with a PRAM ping and although it went to a blank screen and reboot again it stayed with the grey screen after reboot.
 
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