Can't boot Lion after a fall, but can boot Windows from same drive?!...

[Bengt77]

I've dropped my MacBook (a late 2008, aluminium model), about three weeks ago. The glass panel over the display is cracked and the MacBook won't boot. Into Mac OS X, that is. It boots fine to Windows from the same internal hard drive. Strange, isn't it?

I'm running Lion and have FileVault enabled. So I get the decription/login screen right after I try booting into Mac OS X. I can choose a user account, enter a password and my MacBook wil try to beet normally. But after some time, the Apple logo changes to a 'no go' sign (a circle with a diagonal line through it).

I've brought it in for repair, but the repair costs, according to the AASP, would exceed the price I originally paid for my MacBook. So it's basically declared a total loss. I was told the hard drive was defective, but now I'm doubting that claim. If it was indeed defective, I wouldn't be able to boot into Windows perfectly fine, would I? Therefore I'm starting to think it has something to do with FileVault. Is that possible?

Yesterday, I booted from an external drive and tried using Disk Utility to disable encryption on my internal Mac OS X partition. That didn't work, unfortunately. Is there a way to clone my Lion installation to an external drive without decrypting it first? In other words, is there a way to do it low level, bit-by-bit, with FileVault still enabled?

I have a back-up clone from two weeks before I dropped my MacBook, by the way. The only stuff I'm missing is photos from those two weeks. I now wish I hadn't enabled FileVault. That way, I could have went into my Windows installation and copy the files in question to an external drive manually. Now I'm not sure I'll ever recover the photos from those two weeks.

Help?

 

[ezramoore]

It is likely that the drive is defective. It is possible to damage a certain area of the disk and leaving the rest of it relatively unaffected.

Make yourself a bootable disk (DVD/thumb drive/HDD) with OS X on it and try that.

Or, just buck up and order a new hard drive.

 

[Bengt77]

Or, just buck up and order a new hard drive.

Already did that. It'll be here tomorrow. I've tried everything, but by now I'm now convinced nothing will be able to let me access the damaged partition. As it turned out, though, I'm 'only' missing nine days worth of photos. Of course that's still a shame, but in the grand scheme of things it really isn't all that bad. In fact, it could have been a lot worse. I really can't imagine what people must feel when this happens and they have no backup to fall back on.

 

[ezramoore]

Have hope! I recover data from drives that won't boot all the time.

Once you get your new drive, get an enclosure too. Stick the old drive in the enclosure after you reload your OS and backup, and try to access the files.

If the data are super important to you, make sure you take it to a professional.