Cannot boot up! Should I wait, keep rebooting, or power-off and wait?

[Yi Shen]

My macbook pro cannot boot pass the blue screen, all startup keys failed to work (https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1075160/). If all I need is one successful boot to copy all my files off the hard disk. Should I:
A. leave it as it is and hope for the blue screen will eventually go away;
B. keep rebooting and hope for the computer will boot up correctly by chance; or
C. Power off and unplug everything, leave it overnight and try booting it again next morning?

I've heard some people could get their computer back to normal just by option C, which sounds weird to me. Is that possible? How does that work?

 

[axu539]

If your system is under warranty, take it to an Apple store. If not, I would take out the hard drive, install it in an enclosure, and try it on a different system to get your data off.

I've also recently heard that a dead hard drive can cause all boot options to not work. This is purely anecdotal and makes no sense to me. But if this is the case, you're out of luck. You'll save money on repairing/replacing the computer itself, but your data would be toast, unless you spend possibly even MORE money with expensive data recovery services.

Good luck

 

[sydenham]

Maybe you can try to boot into firewire mode by holding down the T button, then you could back up your hard drive once you have access