Hard Drive No Longer Booting

[mackslc]

I installed a brand new 500 GB Western Digital Scorpio Blue hard drive back in April, been running Lion 10.7.3 since without any problems. Until tomorrow when I go to start up my computer and all it does is go to the Apple logo and the loading screen. Putting in my old hard drive the computer works fine, and when I run Disk Utility by booting it through the OS X Install Disk I can verify/repair disks without any problem. As far as I can tell all my data is still on there (still says some files on System Profile and still recognizes my hard drive name and OS) but I can't get it to boot.

Western Digital says they'll cover it under warranty, but I'd really rather just fix this rather than go through the whole process of shipping it out and waiting to get a new one then loading all my info over. Can anyone think of a way to troubleshoot this? Or at least what may have gone wrong? Haven't downloaded anything shady lately at all. Thanks.

 

[Fishrrman]

"Can anyone think of a way to troubleshoot this?"

Can you spend $20-25?
I'd suggest you get something like this:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias=aps&field-keywords=usb+sata+dock&x=0&y=0
(many items shown, they all work the same, just pick one you like that's cheap)
Here's one on Dealmac.com as of yesterday:
http://dealmac.com/Rosewill-USB-Hard-Drive-Docking-Station-for-12-free-shipping/599689.html

You can boot from these, as well.
Having a USB/SATA dock makes drive swapping and troubleshooting MUCH easier.

Since you have the old drive back in the computer, I'd suggest:
1. Get the dock
2. Put the WD drive into it
3. Attempt basic repairs (Disk Utility, etc.)
4. If that doesn't work, re-initialize and test again
5. If the drive responds favorably to re-initialization, restore your data to it "as it was", but DON'T put it back into the Mac yet
6. Instead, use it as an external boot drive for, say, a month -- this should help you ascertain whether the problems you were experiencing were "software-related" (such as a corrupted directory), or, "hardware-related" (physical problem with the drive itself).

 

[murphychris]

So far there's no evidence there's a problem with the hard drive itself. That the file system is OK indicates that the drive is probably functioning OK, at least in the areas where the file system is located. But what you report could be a corrupt kext cache or even a corrupt bootloader although that's kinda rare.

What happens when you try booting in Safe Mode? It will take longer because it includes an fsck_hfs. But if that works, you've got other problems that need investigating.

What is Safe Boot mode?