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mrsir2009

macrumors 604
Original poster
Sep 17, 2009
7,505
156
Melbourne, Australia
Hey, I know this is a common question, but this situation is different:

My 2009 13" MacBook Pro froze when I was browsing the internet (it doesn't often freeze). I hard-restarted it and it hung on the grey screen with the Apple logo and the spinning cog. I hard-restarted a few more times, but it hung for over 20 minutes, which indicated something was wrong.

I reset the SMC, PRAM, repaired disk permissions and tried boot up in safe-mode, but to no avail. The computer was making all the usual noises, so there were no sounds of any kind of failure. However when I left it hanging on the grey screen for about 20-30 minutes the fans revved up, and when I felt the underside of the laptop I found it was really hot!

Any ideas to get it to start up, and why it heated up so much on the boot screen?
 
Boot it in verbose mode. What's coming up on the screen?

If you see anything along these lines:

disk0s2: I/O error

Then you probably have a bad hard drive. It could also be the cable.
 
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