Unmounted Internal Hard drive

[mclove]

HI, I'm hoping someone can provide some help with my situation.

I have a MacBook Pro that was very sluggish, and froze when I tried to restart. I turned the machine off by holding the power button. When I turned it back on, it went directly to the OS X Utilities screen. I tried using the repair disk button but it did not work. I took it in to the Apple store. They re-installed the OS but that did not work either.
They said the next step would be to do a factory reset but everything on it would be lost. I looked into data recovery services and most charge anywhere from $350-$500. Which is way more than I want to spend to get my iPhoto library back.
So when i hilite the HD tab in the OS X utilities screen, I notice that it says it is unmounted. Does this mean its just not connecting, and the data is preserved? If so, what could I possibly do to either fix the issue, or retrieve my data?

Thanks

 

[asriznet]

HI, I'm hoping someone can provide some help with my situation.

I have a MacBook Pro that was very sluggish, and froze when I tried to restart. I turned the machine off by holding the power button. When I turned it back on, it went directly to the OS X Utilities screen. I tried using the repair disk button but it did not work. I took it in to the Apple store. They re-installed the OS but that did not work either.
They said the next step would be to do a factory reset but everything on it would be lost. I looked into data recovery services and most charge anywhere from $350-$500. Which is way more than I want to spend to get my iPhoto library back.
So when i hilite the HD tab in the OS X utilities screen, I notice that it says it is unmounted. Does this mean its just not connecting, and the data is preserved? If so, what could I possibly do to either fix the issue, or retrieve my data?

Thanks

Do you have another working mac? If yes, see if both your mac supports target disk mode - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1661

FireWire target disk mode allows a Macintosh computer with a FireWire port (the target computer) to be used as an external hard disk connected to another computer (the host). Once a target computer is started up as a FireWire hard disk and is available to the host computer, you can copy files to or from that volume.

- If this is not possible, get a portable HDD that is free to be erased and plug it into your macbook pro.
- startup up to OS X recovery and wipe the portable HDD
- run the OS X installation on the portable HDD.
- As soon as installation completes, you will have a working OS running off the portable HDD
- See if the internal HDD is mounting this time, if yes, copy it over to the portable HDD

 

[Weaselboy]

HI, I'm hoping someone can provide some help with my situation.

I have a MacBook Pro that was very sluggish, and froze when I tried to restart. I turned the machine off by holding the power button. When I turned it back on, it went directly to the OS X Utilities screen. I tried using the repair disk button but it did not work. I took it in to the Apple store. They re-installed the OS but that did not work either.
They said the next step would be to do a factory reset but everything on it would be lost. I looked into data recovery services and most charge anywhere from $350-$500. Which is way more than I want to spend to get my iPhoto library back.
So when i hilite the HD tab in the OS X utilities screen, I notice that it says it is unmounted. Does this mean its just not connecting, and the data is preserved? If so, what could I possibly do to either fix the issue, or retrieve my data?

Thanks

What you are describing sounds exactly like a failed drive. Less common, but it could also be a bad drive cable. Sad the Apple store did not recognize this and wasted time reinstalling the OS for no reason.

What year model Mac do you have and we can suggest a way to recovery from this.

 

[mclove]

What you are describing sounds exactly like a failed drive. Less common, but it could also be a bad drive cable. Sad the Apple store did not recognize this and wasted time reinstalling the OS for no reason.

What year model Mac do you have and we can suggest a way to recovery from this.

Its a late 2008 MacBook Pro. Any suggestions would be great! Thanks so much.

----------

Do you have another working mac? If yes, see if both your mac supports target disk mode - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1661



- If this is not possible, get a portable HDD that is free to be erased and plug it into your macbook pro.
- startup up to OS X recovery and wipe the portable HDD
- run the OS X installation on the portable HDD.
- As soon as installation completes, you will have a working OS running off the portable HDD
- See if the internal HDD is mounting this time, if yes, copy it over to the portable HDD

Hi, Thanks for the reply.
I believe this is what they did at the Apple store. They connected the Macbook via a cable to their system to run some diagnostics. Everything came back OK (or so he said). But when he went into another form of diagnostics, even the store's system could not find the hard drive on the macbook. Thats when he suggested the OS re-install and/or a complete re-format.

 

[Weaselboy]

Its a late 2008 MacBook Pro. Any suggestions would be great! Thanks so much.

It really does just sound like your hard drive died.

Two issues. The first as far as data recovery, you can try putting the drive in an external enclosure then using something like DiskWarrior to recover files from the drive once your system is up and running on a new drive. Although since the disk won't even mount, I would not be optimistic about this. If the data is really important you can send the disk out to a commercial data recovery service, but that will be VERY expensive.

Now to fix your Macbook. Get yourself a new drive like this WD in whatever size you want, then install the new drive.

Your 2008 does not support Internet recovery, so we need to get you an OS on there somehow. Do you happen to still have the installer DVD that cam with the machine or maybe a Snow Leopard installer DVD? You can boot to that and use the disk to format the new drive then install the OS.

Or, your Mac will run Mavericks, but you will need an installer. Do you have a friend or Apple Store nearby where you could download the Mavericks installer on another Mac then use this utility with an 8GB or larger USB key to make an installer. Then you can option key boot to the installer and format the drive and install.

Like I mentioned, it is possible a bad drive cable is causing this too... but much much less common. You can test for this by putting the drive in an external enclosure then trying to boot to it. If it was me, I would just pop in a new drive though.

Let us know what resources you have available as fas as another Mac and we can walk you through this.

 

[mclove]

It really does just sound like your hard drive died.

Two issues. The first as far as data recovery, you can try putting the drive in an external enclosure then using something like DiskWarrior to recover files from the drive once your system is up and running on a new drive. Although since the disk won't even mount, I would not be optimistic about this. If the data is really important you can send the disk out to a commercial data recovery service, but that will be VERY expensive.

Now to fix your Macbook. Get yourself a new drive like this WD in whatever size you want, then install the new drive.

Your 2008 does not support Internet recovery, so we need to get you an OS on there somehow. Do you happen to still have the installer DVD that cam with the machine or maybe a Snow Leopard installer DVD? You can boot to that and use the disk to format the new drive then install the OS.

Or, your Mac will run Mavericks, but you will need an installer. Do you have a friend or Apple Store nearby where you could download the Mavericks installer on another Mac then use this utility with an 8GB or larger USB key to make an installer. Then you can option key boot to the installer and format the drive and install.

Like I mentioned, it is possible a bad drive cable is causing this too... but much much less common. You can test for this by putting the drive in an external enclosure then trying to boot to it. If it was me, I would just pop in a new drive though.

Let us know what resources you have available as fas as another Mac and we can walk you through this.

I have a 1TB WD external hard drive and a mac mini desktop computer to work with.
I really appreciate your help. Thanks!

 

[Weaselboy]

I have a 1TB WD external hard drive and a mac mini desktop computer to work with.
I really appreciate your help. Thanks!

Ah.... good. As long as the Mini is 2009 or later you can just DL Mavericks on there and make the installer USB key. Then install the new drive and option key boot to the USB key. Then use Disk Util to erase the drive to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format. Then quit Disk Util and click install and off you go.

 

[mclove]

Ah.... good. As long as the Mini is 2009 or later you can just DL Mavericks on there and make the installer USB key. Then install the new drive and option key boot to the USB key. Then use Disk Util to erase the drive to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format. Then quit Disk Util and click install and off you go.

Thank you so much! I will try this all out toinght after work!
I knew I had come to the right place

 

[simonsi]

I notice that it says it is unmounted.

Unfortunately a number of problems could exist including the data on the drive being totally lost - but if you can't get it to mount then the data is effectively lost anyway.

The only suggestion I have to the above is to extract the drive and put it in an external USB caddy, that would rule out problems with the logic board disk controller if the disk is readable that way but you would either need to create the external boot drive as above, or have another machine available to connect the USB caddy to.