Blackbook with white screen of death!! Help Please!

[Lurchdubious]

Ok, so my friend has had her blackbook for a year and a half with zero problems. No applecare. All of a sudden she has a white screen and can't do anything with it. She tried troubleshooting it on Apple's website, but no joy. We're thinking it might be a dead hard drive? Does that sound right? If so, what HD would you recommend?

Thanks a ton!

 

[MarkMS]

Does she have anything connected to the MacBook like an iPod or external drive? If so, remove them and restart. Have you tried resetting the PRAM? That might help.

Sometimes white screens are caused by iPods and other things connected to a computer. If none of these things work, it might really be a dead drive. Almost anything from Seagate and WD are pretty good. Check out Newegg and Macsales.com for decent prices.

 

[Lurchdubious]

Does she have anything connected to the MacBook like an iPod or external drive? If so, remove them and restart. Have you tried resetting the PRAM? That might help.

Sometimes white screens are caused by iPods and other things connected to a computer. If none of these things work, it might really be a dead drive. Almost anything from Seagate and WD are pretty good. Check out Newegg and Macsales.com for decent prices.

Thanks! I'll give her the link, I'm not sure if she tried that yet. I'm pretty sure she already tried unhooking everything and restarting and she did some other troubleshooting, but all I know is that nothing she tried worked. Thanks again.

 

[Lurchdubious]

So she already tried resetting the PRAM and stuff earlier today. Said she got a folder with a question mark, but that's it; couldn't go anywhere. Broken hard drive?

 

[BlackMax]

So she already tried resetting the PRAM and stuff earlier today. Said she got a folder with a question mark, but that's it; couldn't go anywhere. Broken hard drive?

Sounds like it. Have her boot from her installation DVD that came with her MB and use Disk Utility to check if the internal hard drive is available.

You can do this by:

1. Place your OS X installation DVD in the SuperDrive
2. Restart your MB and immediately press the c key. The computer will look for a bootable CD or DVD and, if it finds one, will use it as its startup device.
3. Choose Disk Utility from the Utilities menu.
4. Check if Disk Utility sees your hard drive.

If the internal hard drive does not show up in Disk Utility then it has probably died and you'll need to replace it and restore your data from a backup if you have one.