Macbook Pro stuck at an Apple start up screen.

[theBeefman]

I post this on behalf of my friend.

My friend bought a Macbook Pro for college and has had troubles with it and after taking it to support, she was told that there could be problems with the logic board or the OS. Because of this, she was told to buy a Western Digital My Passport for Mac (500GB) if she wanted to back up her system, which she did.

She said she just backed up the system and then followed this guide in order to wipe all data off of her hard drive before sending it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrPCDbvHuMQ&fmt=22

So, after she puts in the CD and restart her system, her computer boots up but she goes straight to the Apple screen (seen at 1:58; she basically can't get past 1:58). It has been stuck there for 20-35 minutes. She has restarted the system multiple times. The disc tray won't eject either, so the installer disc is stuck, too. Help please.

 

[flopticalcube]

Follow the steps outlined in the link in my sig.

 

[Dwalls90]

I post this on behalf of my friend.

My friend bought a Macbook Pro for college and has had troubles with it and after taking it to support, she was told that there could be problems with the logic board or the OS. Because of this, she was told to buy a Western Digital My Passport for Mac (500GB) if she wanted to back up her system, which she did.

She said she just backed up the system and then followed this guide in order to wipe all data off of her hard drive before sending it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrPCDbvHuMQ&fmt=22

So, after she puts in the CD and restart her system, her computer boots up but she goes straight to the Apple screen (seen at 1:58; she basically can't get past 1:58). It has been stuck there for 20-35 minutes. She has restarted the system multiple times. The disc tray won't eject either, so the installer disc is stuck, too. Help please.

So, Apple allows you to enter what is called Single User Mode. Reboot your machine and as soon as you hear the 'bong', hold down the Command (Apple Key) and 'S' keys. Continue holding them down until you see some rather obnoxious looking old ASCII text go streaming down the screen. This means you are booted up outside the Jaguar User GUI and can directly perform file system repairs. Once you get to a cursor prompt (a solid white box that doesn't blink), type in the following without quotes,

fsck -y

(note the blank space before the "-y"). All this means in code is "File System Check, yes to all" It will immediately start running through your boot partition and looking for and correcting any problems. This can take a while; the Mac OSX file system has tens and tens of thousands of files.

When it is finished checking the disk, it will give you a one-line report. If it found problems, it will state "Disk X has been modified." If no problems were found, it will state "Disk X appears to be OK." If you get the "...modified" statement, run "fsck -y" again repeatedly until you get the "...OK" statement. This check may need to be run up to four times on a system with serious problems.

When you get the "...OK" message, type

Reboot

This will restart your machine and return you to the User GUI interface you know and love. Perform this once a week, or whenever you smell trouble. It can't hurt you and it might help catch a problem before the problem catches you!

I know it references older OS X but it still works ... if this doesn't work you can boot the drive using target disk mode on another Mac, drag off the files that she wants, and then have the computer repaired/replaced.

 

[theBeefman]

Follow the steps outlined in the link in my sig.

Thank you.

She now says that the Mac tells her that the operation can't be done on the computer and won't let her reinstall the OS.

"the operation couldn't be completed", with "quit" being the only option on the bottom right.

We actually got past the Apple logo screen it seems, thank you.

She now gets this error message:

"the operation couldn't be completed", with "quit" being the only option on the bottom right

 

[discounteggroll]

if that's the case it sounds like a failed hard drive with bad blocks/sectors. If under warrant I'd bring it in for hard drive replacement, otherwise she should get a new 2.5" sata drive for it.

 

[Dwalls90]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

Using the is install disc, run disk utility and make sure the disk is repaired. After, use disk utility to DELETE and then FORMAT the drive which will fully restore it as an empty drive. If you can't install to that drive then I'm 99.9% sure it's hardware related.