Need help!! Anything I can do to repair this!?

[pacerrrr]

So I went to boot up my late 2007 Macbook which still was running strong and it presented a question mark on boot up. So I tried going into Safe mode and I tried bypassing the internal hard drive to get to disk utility and it keeps saying "An unknown error occurred!" with a big yellow caution sign and my only options are to reboot or shutdown. Is there anything I can do to save it?

 

[DeltaMac]

The flashing question mark means that your Mac can't find a bootable system.
Could be a small glitch, or maybe a missing or corrupted boot file.
If you are trying to "bypass the internal hard drive" by booting to the recovery system (Command + R), and that's when you get the error screen, then that is more likely that the hard drive has failed (the Recovery System is another partition on the same hard drive, so if neither boots, then that is NOT a good sign)
You can remove the hard drive from one of those old Macbooks in less than 2 minutes.
I have replaced the hard drive (my Early 2008 MacBook is identical to yours), with a cheap SSD. What a difference, even with the old MacBook.
Do you have anything on the old hard drive that is important/not replaceable?
Take your old hard drive, place it in an external dock/enclosure, where you can try to retrieve any important files.

 

[pacerrrr]

Hey thanks so much for the reply. I dont need anything off of the hard drive as I back everything up to google drive but if I cant access disk utility how would I go able fixing my hard drive? Would I have to connect it as an external to another computer and install an OS from there? I have a 750gb hard drive right now. Do you think it would be worth upgrading to a SSD? Even if I did decide to get a new SSD, after installing it would I be able to install the OS on it from my computer or would I have to go through another computer externally?
thanks

The flashing question mark means that your Mac can't find a bootable system.
Could be a small glitch, or maybe a missing or corrupted boot file.
If you are trying to "bypass the internal hard drive" by booting to the recovery system (Command + R), and that's when you get the error screen, then that is more likely that the hard drive has failed (the Recovery System is another partition on the same hard drive, so if neither boots, then that is NOT a good sign)
You can remove the hard drive from one of those old Macbooks in less than 2 minutes.
I have replaced the hard drive (my Early 2008 MacBook is identical to yours), with a cheap SSD. What a difference, even with the old MacBook.
Do you have anything on the old hard drive that is important/not replaceable?
Take your old hard drive, place it in an external dock/enclosure, where you can try to retrieve any important files.

 

[BeyondtheTech]

Maybe I'm wrong but I've never seen that particular screenshot before. It's as if a third-party application, not something native to OS X, has caused the failure. I searched for that screenshot in Google and can't seem to find any close resemblance to it. Perhaps it's malware that corrupted the drive?

 

[Weaselboy]

Maybe I'm wrong but I've never seen that particular screenshot before. It's as if a third-party application, not something native to OS X, has caused the failure. I searched for that screenshot in Google and can't seem to find any close resemblance to it. Perhaps it's malware that corrupted the drive?

I agree. I have never seen a no boot message anything like that and in color. I think OP has something else going on here.

 

[jon8214]

That looks very much like the macpostfactor error. OP do you have macpostfactor installed? If you don't know can you give us the details and what os you were running on it.

 

[Weaselboy]

That looks very much like the macpostfactor error. OP do you have macpostfactor installed? If you don't know can you give us the details and what os you were running on it.

I think you are spot on. Looks similar to this message.