Macbook Pro help please!?

[AlliM97]

Hi! My MacBook Pro won't load whenever I try to turn it on. When I press the power button, I hear the greeting chimes, and the white screen with the apple appears. Either the loading circle or the bar (or both) pops up for a moment under the apple and this lasts for about a minute, then the screen goes black. Nothing happens if I press the mouse or keyboard keys. I've turned it back on about three times and it keeps doing the same thing. And it is fully charged.

 

[Plymouthbreezer]

From Macworld:

If your Mac turns on, and the display works, but it won't boot, there could be many issues at play. But the one we like to rule out right away - or repair, if possible - is any problem afflicting the hard drive. The easiest first step on that front is to run Disk Utility. On a Mac running OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion or later, you can run Disk Utility by booting into OS X Recovery Mode.

Make sure the Mac is off. (If it's not responsive because it's stuck on a grey, blue or white screen, just hold down the Mac's power button for several seconds until it gives up and shuts off.) Hold down the Command and R keys, and power the Mac back up again.

Eventually, you'll end up on a screen headlined OS X Utilities. (Once you see that screen, you can release the keys you were holding down.) Click on Disk Utility. Then click on your Mac's built-in hard drive in the left column of Disk Utility. (Usually, you'll see two listings for your built-in drive: the first includes the drive's size, like 500GB, in its name; and nested underneath it is your drive's friendlier name. You want that second one.) On the lower right of the Disk Utility window, click Verify Disk, and then wait while Disk Utility does its thing.

Give this a try and report your to us your findings.

 

[DeltaMac]

Can you tell us which MacBook Pro you have?

 

[AlliM97]

From Macworld:


Give this a try and report your to us your findings.

I did that, it went through verifying my disk, but then it said the disk needed repairs. So I went ahead and clicked on Repair Disk. But then this (see image) popped up, saying Disk Utility can't repair the disk, and that I need back up and restore my files?

I clicked OK and now I'm just stuck on Disk Utility. What do I do?

 

[AlliM97]

Can you tell us which MacBook Pro you have?

It's a 13.3 inch MacBook Pro, which I got around August 2012, if that helps?

 

[DeltaMac]

Your Disk Utility tells you what you need to do now.
You will need to back up as much as you can from the hard drive.
Reformat (erase) the hard drive, then restore your files from your backup.

You may ask why this happened... Hard to really say, probably some glitch that caused some files on your drive to be corrupted. That's not usually too much of an issue, and the file system/operating system can usually take care of minor issues that happen with files and your drive directory. However, it some of the inner system files become corrupted, that can cause more serious issues, such as failure to boot. The only way back is to reinstall. Best reinstall will be completely erasing the hard drive. You lose everything that isn't backed up. You don't really need to back up anything that can be reinstalled, such as your major apps, and the operating system itself. Everything else, pictures, music, personal documents, business files, all those will be gone if you don't already have them backed up.

And, you have a hard drive. If you are otherwise ready to go to erase and reinstall (and you have a current back up with everything that you want to save), then this might be a good time, after several years use, to replace the hard drive with an SSD. That will immediately give you faster booting, and almost everything that you do with your Mac will be much faster

 

[hobowankenobi]

It is common that when a HD has this issue, the drive may be starting a death spiral.

A large study by Google on thousands of HDs published years ago showed that when an HD starts to have block failures, usually the problem will continue, and the drive will fail.

While using a tool like DiskWarrior, or formatting and reinstalling everything may revive the drive (likely temporarily), it would be much wiser to simply buy a new HD (or better yet an SSD), and install it, and start fresh. If you have any issues with the HD again, you will have to repeat the process.....again. Do it once with a new drive, and move on.

Even the slowest new HD will give better performance than a 2012 model. As Delta said, SSD will make your machine feel much faster than it ever has before. And, bonus, your odds of another problem will be greatly reduced.