MacBook Pro :: When It Tries Find The Hard Drive To Startup The Harddrive Disappears
Jun 24, 2012
I have tried booting it up from the startup disk and when it tries to find the harddrive to install on it takes a long time to find it then the icon disappears off the screen and I can't select anything
Info:
MacBook Pro (13-inch Mid 2009), Mac OS X (10.5.7)
My August 2007 MacBook runs OSX 10.4.10. It has performed flawlessly since my daughter bought it in 2007, and perfectly after I purchased it from her last september. The other night I was surfing the web while flying on a commercial airliner. (GoGoNet or something similar) Performance was kind of slow but I attributed that to the in-air wifi, which I had never used before. Then the browser started to hang with the spinning pinwheel. Option apple escape WOULD NOT force quit safari. After a few shutdowns using only the power button, the mac hung up on startup. I hear the chime, see the apple icon, the gear turns but it never goes past that point. It may be significant that the plane was flying through scary turbulence when my problems began.
When I boot up using the mac install disk 1, I can get it to start cleanly using the C key, the D key and NO keys. But when I run the hardware diagnostic, both short and long test, the mac comes up 100% clean. But i cannot see any test for the hard drive. When I try to run disk utility, the colored pinwheel arrives and it never goes away. When I go down the road of re-installing the system software, I cannot see the target drive.
When I put my ear on the deck, just to the right of the track-pad, I can hear the hard drive quietly spinning away with regular - not random - clicks.
I see that Apple is quietly replacing these hard-drives, but the affected computers seem to have a folder/question mark on the desktop on startup, not the apple/spinning gear.
I really would like to be able to recover my photos and some files if the hard drive is going to be swapped. But I am resigned to the situation that these un-backed-up files will be forever lost.
I got a second hand macbook pro on tuesday, it is the 13" 2010 model and is two months old. However it keeps causing me all kinds of problems, and I am not sure if it is my fault, a hardware fault or something else. I'll describe what I've done to it; When I got it I wiped the hard drive and did a clean install of OSX, then I imported everything from my old mac through migration assistant. However when I then started using my new mac, the 'home' folder was a different name so some files didn't match up, like my dropbox account and some games. I don't know if this has caused other problems within the directories or anything like that.
It is usually fine for about 6 hours, it's pretty quick and I have been through disk utility in this time and the verify process has been ok. However after this time the it starts being really slow. Like I'm talking 10 - 15 minutes to open an application. Every time this happens I open disk utility to check on it, and it always needs to be repaired as there are folders and directories missing. However when I turn it off and go into disc utility through the install disc it doesn't let me repair it as the drive cannot be unmounted, but then the HD disappears from disk utility completely.
On top of this I tried to install XP through boot camp earlier, but the partition wouldn't format, so I went back through boot camp assistant and deleted the partition. However whenever I turn it on I have to hold down the command key and select the Macintosh HD, because if i don't it tries to boot into windows, even though the partition has been deleted and the HD merged back into the Mac HD. When I boot through the command key, the only option there is the Mac HD, so I don't know where it is getting windows from.
The battery is not what I expected in this thing either. I have put this on another post but I wanted to complain about it again. I have noticed that on a full charge i only get 6 - 7 hours browsing the internet, way off the 'approximately 10 hours'. When I go into istat menus apparently it has a cycle count of 68 and the health of the battery is 89%, which seems very low to me. Whenever I do manage to get it to turn on, it never remembers my settings for the back lit keyboard or the screen brightness. They are always on full whack even though I turn them down to half every time I use it.
Basically, on this fine christmas day (don't get me started on that, the dog got more presents than I did and now my mum is singing Susan Boyle at the top of her lungs) I was wondering if any of you could help me with these problems? I'm thinking I may just have to wipe the HD again and reimport everything manually but I really don't want to do that. I do love Apple Macs and I don't want to get rid of this thing, but it is driving me mental. I turned the Macbook Pro on when I started writing this on my old Macbook. It is now 8 minutes later and it has still not booted. It is just sat there looking all smug with the spinny thing below the apple on the grey screen.
I'm new to this forum, but need help with my external harddrives (WD Pasport 250GB). I can find it in my disk utility, but not on my desktop. I had WD send me a new drive, but now I do not know how to transfer the info from the old drive. Its not a dead drive- its obviously turned on and connected, but I can't mount it to my desktop. Any advice??
i noticed there was no hard drive icon on the desktop. so i opened up the finder, and made the mistake by dragging the hard drive icon that is on the left side of the finder out of the finder and tried to put it on the desktop.
I've just bought a new MacBook Pro (Lion) as my 6 year old iMac (Snow Leopard) has died. I wanted to restore my data from my iMac, via my Time Machine back-ups which are stored on a WD MyPassport. When using the migration assistant, I've followed the instructions, but the assistant refuses to see the hard drive and all I get is "Looking for Other Computers" and a spinning wheel.
I can't find the data I saved onto a WD Passport for Mac external hard drive. I know there is something on the external drive, but I can't see it when I open up the icon for it. I didn't save it using time machine
I deleted my startup and recovery drives. I still have every thing on external hard drive but cannot get my drives back on internal drive. Is there anyway to get those drives back and get all my info from my external drive back on my computer?
I've downloaded a classical piece, which is played and downloaded, it seems, with the little bar in the middle of a white screen.It disappears. I can't find it in the directories, with spotlight, or anything. Why isn't there a way to track it down?
i just made a secondary user in tiger os x. i've set it to be able to admin the machine. for some reason it wont let me save to my my secondary internal hd (which houses all my docs, work, and music) is there some way around it?
I used to use an application that was able to list every file/directory on my hard drive and list them in order of size. I edit large MP2 video files and sometimes it's hard to remember where they all live... this tool was useful because MP2 files are so large, they often are the biggest files on my machine.
I've got the sick iMac of a friend at home. The hard disk on his intel based iMac (2008) crashed completely. I can start up the computer using my OS install CD (SL), but when I go to Disk Utiliy there's no hard disk there. Only the DVD drive, which does tell me enough.Is there a way I could still start up my friend's iMac from either an external hard disk or my own iMac (2011 OS 10.7.2)?
I suppose I probably need Fireware to install the OS (SL) on an external drive using my friend's iMac. When I follow the instructions on the DVD to partition the external drive (GUID partition) and go back to the installation I keep on getting the message I need to partition. The external drive I've been using is USB connected and I have the feeling that SL doesn't support USB and I need Fireware.
When I try to use my own iMac to install the SL on the external drive I am of course being told I cannot start up from SL because I've got Lion installed. I know I could bypass this problem (holding down a certain key I presume), but do I want to take that risk, since my own computer is working smoothly and I don't want to jeopardize it.
Could I create some sort of network between my iMac and my friend's? The main reason I would like to get the sick iMac to start up is to try to rescue some of the data my friend has on there. He has made a backup of his files when the hard disk started to "act strangely" (about 6 months ago - pity we don't have a "sighing" icon here), but he continued to just force the computer to start up until it gave up on him completely. Now he still has got stuff on there he feels sorry to lose.
I have an approx 145GB hard drive and it is completely full. I cannot figure out what is filling it up. All of the files, docs and applications only add up to about 50GB. The disc utility says that there are 250,000 files but the finder can only find about 10,000.
I just installed a new hard drive successfully (I think) onto my Powerbook G4 after my original died. I installed Leopard from the legal CD - but now I can't find the Airport program. I know I have the original wireless card because my computer was running wireless on my old hard drive. Any advice out there?
I also realised that Dashboard didn't install with my OSX dvd. On the apple website that program is specified (as with Airport). Am I doing something wrong?
I have and Maxtor touch one III. I have installed the software update for mac OS, but it still wont find my hard drive. Its not mac format, but its FAT32 and I heard that worked as well. I can try to format it to mac format, but there is still some data on it that I want.
After the latest Leopard update, my imac can not find one of the external hard drives attached to it via usb. I have check all the usb ports with other devices with no problems. I checked the external hard drive on another computer and had no problems reading it.
I have a MacBook Pro and when I click on the harddrive and Get Info, it tells me I have used 100 gigs of 111 available. But when I right click on Macintosh HD in Finder and Select All of the folders and hit Get Info, it tells me they add up to only 95gigs. Where is the other 5 gigs hiding? My trash is empty.
My Imac cannot find its hard drive. When I turn it on it shows a folder with a blinking question mark. And even when I go to reinstall the software it can't find a destination. What can I do?
I have an external hard drive that I use to back up my Mac with Time Machine. Where on that drive would I be able to find web bookmarks that I have since deleted from Safari?I don't want to reset all on my bookmarks, just look up one.