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Boot problem with flashing folder with question mark and no Macintosh HD

M

mur79

Suspended
Original poster
May 18, 2015
2
0
Hi everyone,

today I was watching a video on youtube and, at some point, everything was frozen.
I restarted it, but the only thing I obtained is a flashing folder with a question mark.
I checked in google and I found this apple support:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203176

but it was useless, because I can not access to the Recovery System, nor the Safe Mode nor to the Single User Mode.
The only thing I can do is to use the Internet Recovery. But in this configuration the Disk Utilty does not see the "Macintosh HD" but only "Mac OS X Base System".
I tryed fsck but it sees just the "Base" partition, and for it is ok.
I tryed to reinstall the OS, always from the Internet Recovery, but I can not, because it dose not see the HD.

Does anyone have any suggestion?
Thank you very much
Ciccio
 
My sister had this happen on her macbook pro. I don't remember the year. I took my USB / Thunderbolt drive over with my Yosemite boot disk and with it connected to the thunderbolt port it would not boot. no lights on the disk like it wasn't being powered up or enabled. I switched the cable to USB and it started working and after booting into recovery mode off the USB hard drive I checked her system settings and it was not finding an internal hard drive at all. I thought maybe the drive was dead so I had her start to order a replacement and since I had my tools I went ahead and opened up her laptop. I was curious so I took her drive out and put it into my USB carrier and my mac laptop saw it just fine. No errors, all files intact. Her laptop SATA or something stopped functioning and since it did not see my thunderbolt drive I assume maybe it is related. Tried the PRAM reset and all. She hasn't taken it in yet to see what needs replacing.
 
I'm guessing you have a unibody MacBook Pro between 2009 and 2012? Check the hard drive cable. If the hard drive boots from an external USB caddy then you probably need a new hard drive cable. They're not expensive and pretty easy to replace. Just make sure you're getting the right one for your Mac.
 
Hi,
thanks for the suggestions, I will try and see what happen.
Ciccio
 
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