Macbook lost power during Software Update, can't login now

[cowbellallen]

Hi,

I have a Macbook that was performing a pretty huge software update when my brother unplugged the power supply for some idiotic reason. It now takes about 3 minutes to get to the login screen and after that it won't load anything else.

The CD drive on it is trashed, so I hooked it up to my iMac via Firewire and booted it in target disk mode to reinstall Snow Leopard. I open the installer, and it says that it will take 1 hour and 4 minutes to boot. After that, the bar stays still and won't move. It won't let me cancel the installation ('removing installer support files'), and I'm at a loss of what to do.

Can anyone help me, please?

 

[cowbellallen]

Okay, I reinstalled OSX using an external USB drive, but now I can't get a login screen or anything. It's just a blue screen no matter what I do.

Has anyone got a fix?

 

[brian540]

try resetting the PRAM

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1379

 

[cowbellallen]

try resetting the PRAM

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1379

Thanks. I tried that and no luck. I'm going to try installing it again.

 

[cowbellallen]

Oh good grief. 'Install failed'.

 

[S.B.G]

It sounds like when it was unplugged that the battery lost power too as it was on low charge. Is that right?

Either way, this is probably a hardware problem now, the HDD while writing the update was powered off and it probably corrupted a sector or several sectors. You should probably try and get ahold of some HDD recovery software. One that I always recommend is SpinRite. But to use it, you will need to pull the HDD out and connect it to an IBM PC to use it. There are other options out there if you search for them. Or you can look for local computer shops who can fix it too. In the end you will probably need to buy a new HDD, even if you successfully recover this one, because now it's life is reduced.

If you have a good Time Machine backup, you can buy a new HDD and then restore from TM.