So, yes, i'm not typing this on my MacBook right now, i'm typing this on my desktop running Ubuntu but that's beyond the point. So last night, my 2008 Aluminum Unibody MacBook was working just fine, everything booted up and shut off fine, I go to sleep for the night, wake up and try to boot it up but it stops after the gray apple logo and shut's off. Now, I know the problem because throughout the day, i've tried resetting the PRAM, running Verbose mode, running single user mode and even running Disk Utility from my Snow Leopard disk but to no avail, none of these options worked. It was this point, I decided, ugghhhhh, looks like I have to schedule a Genius appointment which I did, and I went to it, The "Genius" was able to boot it up from his hard drive but saw the hard drive was dieing, he told me it was still mountable and everything can still be retrieved from it but it would cost me $193 to do it, he said he can put everything on my external hard drive for me and I would have to buy my own SSD and do it myself or I could have Central Computers, a computer shop in the bay area do it for me. Now, I have a couple questions for you guys. What should I do? Central Computers already has the MacBook and I already paid the $30 diagnostic fee. If I were to do this myself, how would I? Since everything on the external is just files, Would I have to reinstall Mac OSX or is there a complicated way to transfer the files and have it acting as it did beforehand? With a new SSD and my stuff recovered on an external drive, How would I basically turn my Mac into what it was before the hard drive failure?
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Aluminum MacBook Hard drive dieing, Central Computers? Apple Store? or D-I-Y?
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I highly recommend against the DIY option. You're taking a gamble with our data and it only takes one slip...
Whatever you do, use an experienced pro.
Minus the cost of parts and shipping, I typically do this work for $25. If nothing else works out, check my blog below and I'll be glad to help.
Whatever you do, use an experienced pro.
Minus the cost of parts and shipping, I typically do this work for $25. If nothing else works out, check my blog below and I'll be glad to help.
If I brought it to the Apple Store with an external harddrive of mine, since the Genius was able to boot from his harddrive, would he be able to make a Time Machine back-up of my system which I can boot from if I were to buy a new drive? I know it's a stupid question since most likely the Time Machine would be a back-up of his system but it's another possibility.