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Macbook Pro won't boot past grey screen...

F

fried-gold

macrumors member
Original poster
Nov 9, 2008
95
0
Berlin
Hello

My macbook pro won't boot past the grey screen, I've tried reseting PRam, running fsck from single user etc to no avail. All signs would point towards a hard disk failure, but the curious thing is that it sometimes mounts in disk utility when booting from the install CD, so theres a little life left in it yet! I have fairly recent backups of most of my files, but there are a couple I've been working on in the past few days that won't be backed up. So my question is this - is it possible to copy files from my mac HD onto a external drive through the terminal/disk utility while booting from the CD. Any other advice also much appreciated!

Regards Andy
 
@ GGJstudios thanks for the link, but don't worry I do search the forums before posting, if you read my post you'll see I am asking something a little different from this.

Regards

Andy
 
Target disk mode isn't possible, in Germany with just my laptop, and my girlfriends macbook. Thought about diskwarrior but can't really afford it at the moment, so was looking for something from disk utility or command line. Is this even possible?
 
I had the exact same problem, my HDD was failing and wouldn't boot past the grey screen, I managed to get it to finally boot by starting up in safe mode, it took about 30-40 minutes for it to boot however, than I quickly backed up my files before the whole laptop froze again. If you have another mac, try target disc mode
 
@pyroo, thanks for the advice, decided to give one last try in safe mode before giving up, left it for 40 mins like you said and voila. Took its sweet time but finally have got everything off the drive! Think it will fail any time soon. Geuss i'll be trying to buy a new drive on monday. Thanks again.
 
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