Macbook boot problem - Need help

[MrRadich]

Heres a wierd problem

Just rebooted my macbook, it went onto the screen with the apple logo and the spinning thing and then just turned off.

I checked the batt status and its full, hit the power switch and the same thing happend.

I then ran disc-utill from the install DVD to check the drive and it came out with an error but it did not say what the error was, only that it could not proform the task. After that I tried to do an archive and Install, but when I selecte the Macbook HD as the place to install OSX it says that the drive needs to be formated before installation, so I can only do a format install.

I have Windows installed on partition of the Macbook HD and it works just fine so the drive cant be dead.

It's like on a PC when the Master Boot record go bye bye.

I just want to get my files before I wipe the drive, what are my options?

Btw, I have looked at Diskwarrior, is it any good?

Michael

 

[misterredman]

Did you check the SMART status in disk utility?

 

[chscag]

It does sound like the drive has problems. If you have access to another Mac you can try hooking it together with the problem machine and use Target Disk mode to get at your data.

See this article:

http://guides.macrumors.com/Target_Disk_Mode

Regards.

 

[MrRadich]

Just bought Diskwarrior and burnt it to a CD.

Booted from the CD and did a rebuild of my drive. It found some overlapping files and recovered some files, but 5 min later my Mac is up and running like nothing happend.

I did'nt have high hopes to this program but damm, it works! 🙂

This is my second crash of the harddrive, the first time I called Apple support support and they took my mac in for repairs for two weeks just to change the drive.

If it was'nt for windows partition working, I would just haved call Apple support again to get another repair, but then again maybe the drive was dead the first time maybe not, only the repair shop knows.

-->misterredman:

Is the SMART thing something you can turn on and off or is it something build into the harddrive?

 

[misterredman]

-->misterredman:

Is the SMART thing something you can turn on and off or is it something build into the harddrive?

SMART is usually built in into the hard drive, although it may be possible to disable it. You can check the status in disk utility, at the bottom it reports the status.

More informations here:

http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/perf/qual/featuresSMART.html

There are also third party utility to help you monitor the status, like this one:

http://www.corecode.at/smartreporter/