Snow Leopard won`t boot;Grey screen; EFI Boot; Cannot Repair Disk

[reinisbaab]

Hallo,
this is very very important for me and I`m currently hopeless.....

White Macbook, have been using for 2 years. 3 weeks ago I installed retail Snow Leopard. Did all updates and everything was working perfectly as always. I had turned it off many times, resterted many times and everything was pefect.

BUT, today I restarted my Snow Leopard and it would not boot up. It was stuck on the grey screen. I turned it off (by holding the turn-off button) and started it up again. And again, the grey screen appears, with Apple logo, the loading circle under it and a loading bar below. The bar "loads" to 1/10 and dissapears. The grey screen still is there and then after some 5 min blue screen appears and again gets stuck, the loading circle is still there. Eventually, it never starts up.

I put in the installation disc, and while turning on the computer presed option key. Two option appeared - "EFI Boot" and the max os x installation disc. I had never seen the "EFI Boot" - what is it? It should have been the "Macintosh HD" as usual! When I get to the Snow Leopards Installation menu I launch Disk Utility and try to verify and repair the Macintosh HD. But it does not work:

When presses "Veiry Disk":

Veryfing volume "Macintosh HD"
Checking Journaled HFS Plus Volume.
Checking extents overflow file.
Invalid leaf record count
(It should be 1197 instead of 1199)
Checking catalog file.
Keys out of order
The VOLUME macintosh HD was found corrupt and needs to be repaired.
Error: This disk needs to be repaired. Click repair disk.


When pressed "Repair Disk":

Veryf and Repair volume "Macintosh HD"
Checking Journaled HFS Plus Volume.
Checking extents overflow file.
Invalid leaf record count
(It should be 1197 instead of 1199)
Checking catalog file.
Keys out of order
Rebuilding catalog B-tree.
The volume Macintosh HD could not be repaired.
Volume repair complete.
Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.
Error: Disk Utility can`t repair this disk...disk, and restore your backed-up files.


I tried to boot in safe mode - unsuccesfully.
tried the single-user mode repair stuff 10 times - unsuccesfully.
Tried reset the PRAM - unsucessfully.

What can I do and WHY does this happen?
Everything has worked fine all the time. I remember repairing and verifying disc permission, running Onyx before Snow Leopard install.


The most important thing is that I do NOT have a back up drive and ALL my files are in the Macintosh HD, which I cannot access!!

Are there any solutions to this? In the worst scenario - can I copy all my files off the Macintosh HD to a external drive? (I guess it is not possible :/)

Please, please help!

Thanks

 

[J the Ninja]

You're hard drive is most likely failing. You should have had a backup, and this is why. If you did, you could try a clean install, or just replace the drive and restore from the backup.

Since you don't, you are going to need to get your stuff off somehow. Do you have another Mac you can use Firewire target mode with? If not, your best bet would probably be just replace the hard drive, put a clean copy of OS X on it, then get an enclosure for the old drive so it is an external, and try and get stuff off that way. And in the future, BACK UP. You have Time Machine, and thus no excuse. It will do the whole thing for you, you just need to give it a drive to do it's thing with.

 

[buddhacris]

I have the same problem as you. It happened to me today.

I don't think it's a failed hardrive becauseI replaced Apple's crappy Samsung harddrive (which broke) with a WD HD a year ago. Additionally, I can boot WINDOWS XP without a problem still.

Anyone else have this problem?

 

[brasscat]

This happened to me within the last year -- the hard drive was definitely failing. I ended up having to replace the drive. There are software repairs other than disk utility that can get your computer up and going... but for me this worked only for a few minutes before it crashed again. Other symptoms of a slow drive is extremely slow reads/writes -- so if you suspect before this happened then it's your drive for sure.

 

[t0mat0]

Reset the pram and also the other usual things a few times. happened to me a month back - sorted eventually, but was scared when i reaslied i didn't have a backup. Have you tried target disk mode?

Anyhow, try the resets of PRAM etc a few times, and use the disk utility to try and sort out the drive a few times. then get a backup (image of drive/time machine).

 

[Sun Baked]

Might try a 3rd party drive utility to repair the drive and recover the data.

 

[Topher15]

If you have AppleCare download TechTool Deluxe:
https://support.apple.com/techtooldeluxe/main?id=dl

There's also Disk Warrior:
http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/index.html

Firstly (and if you cannot get either if these) try to connect your Mac to another via Target Disk Mode to see if you can at least access the Mac as a drive. You may be able to get all your stuff.


This happened to me too earlier in the year. In fact it was worse as both my iMac and MacBook went at the same time. My MB was not under warranty so I just replaced the drive. The iMac was under AppleCare but I didn't rush to get it repaired by Apple (as I didn't want to drag it to the store). Then when I installed Snow Leopard the problem just went away.

Here's something you could try from the thread I made about it:

Press the Power button, and immediately press and hold down the Command key and the S key as the machine starts up. This boots you into Single-user mode and you should see white text appear on the screen.
When you see the # command prompt, type /sbin/fsck –fy ) and hit Return.This could take 15 minutes or so—or even longer...
If and when you see the message “File System was modified,” repeat the step above again, and again, until 
you finally, hopefully, see a message saying, “no problems were found.” When that happens type reboot and hit 
Return again. Good Luck​

 

[madog]

When the Apple logo appears on the screen, software is loading. If you don't get that logo and just see gray, it is typically a hardware issue, and then often times a HDD failure.

Furthermore, a bad hard drive could be preventing you from starting up from a system disk, booting in single user mode, etc. To confirm (some of) this, remove the hard drive from the machine, and try to boot up to a disk, or reset the PRAM and it should work (assuming that is all that is wrong with the machine). Not common, but for some reason most of my experience with that is with the white MacBooks (might be their drives that the ones 2-3 years ago had).

If that is the case, Snow Leopard had no direct issue with the drive failing, only that it was either a pure coincidence, or more likely the additional stress from the installation on an already slowly dying drive was the "straw that broke the camel's back", so to speak.

 

[Topher15]

When the Apple logo appears on the screen, software is loading. If you don't get that logo and just see gray, it is typically a hardware issue, and then often times a HDD failure.

And what about having the Apple logo appearing and remaining with nothing else happening?

 

[madog]

And what about having the Apple logo appearing and remaining with nothing else happening?

Well, it's not a 100% "all of the time" thing, but most of the time is a good indicator of what the problem may be.

Also, due to the nature of a hard drive failing, it could end up limping along for 6 months, a couple of hours, or stop instantly. Sometimes on a dying drive it will mount after trying 20 times to do so and last until it is powered down, or could just mount for 5 seconds and shut off on its own, causing the Apple logo to appear but then freeze or return a kernal panic.

 

[leo1703]

I have the same problem as you. It happened to me today.

I don't think it's a failed hardrive becauseI replaced Apple's crappy Samsung harddrive (which broke) with a WD HD a year ago. Additionally, I can boot WINDOWS XP without a problem still.

Anyone else have this problem?

I'm having exactly this problem. Boots perfect from any windows disc boot wont boot from any os x disc even one i made in a usb stick