[fallingman]

Hi Guys.

I hope you can help.
Yesterday, while copying a large file from a USB stick, my MBP froze. After a hard reset - It wont start. All I get upon startup is the apple logo and the spinning line-wheel. The HD makes clicking noises (which lead me to assume an HD failure).
So I tried attaching an external HD that my tech support guys have that should have allowed me to boot from it – it never recognised it and never got past the above screen – holding Alt (Which I believe should have shown me all available disks, only displayed my HD – which still fails) didnt work. I tried the same thing with another Notebook – my MBP never even recognised it was there. I’ve tried holding T while booting, and I get the firewire symbol, but connecting something does nothing.

I can however – boot from a disk.
Booking the install disk then going to Utilities --> Disk Utility tells me that nothing seems wrong with the HD.

I will take it to a genius (if I can get a sodding appointment) but I’m concerned that not being able to connect these other external drives might indicate some kind of BIOS issue?
Could this be right? If so, might there be something I can put on a disk to check that these other elements (non-HD) are ok?

Any help appreciated. I’m a recent switcher and cant bare to see my new baby sick ;-)

[Simon]

Are you sure that external disk you're using can boot a MBP? Is it GPT formated?

If your MBP can boot from a DVD, it should be able to boot from an external disk (hold alt/opt during boot) unless of course your port is fried.

[fallingman]

Hmmm, the plot thickens...
I have no idea what this means..

A friend reccomended me holding Apple-s at startup. I types the lines bsin/fsck -fw etc... then at the end typed "exit"... It loaded!

Now after a reset - its loaded again!

My question is now - did I fix it... or do I run the risk of it happening again?

[AgileHosting]

You just ran an fsck, which is a standard Linux procedure. fsck stands for File System ChecK ...... Google it if you're interested.

It wouldn't hurt to invest in a tool like Disk Warrior to check your filesystem, and run it occasionally (monthly?) to keep your filesystem cleaned up and healthy. Much better than losing data.

Bailey

[fallingman]

Update.
This is Odd. So, this morning my MBP wont boot (again!) This time, I get the “cannot find a bootable disk” icon (the ?Folder).
It wont boot from a firewire external recovery Drive.
It wont boot from OSX dvd (It turned out the disk was for a newer MBP and wouldn’t have worked… but should it at least recognised it?)

We manage to hook it up to another MBP which says the HD is unreadable and errors occur when we try to “repair” it.
We were able to format the disk…

Now it recognises the Firewire drive.

So, this would seem to me to be that my HDD has given up the ghost – but the inability to see the firewire drive (and perhaps the disk, even though it was wrong) gives me pause.

Could this be solely an HDD issue? Or might it be more complicated Hardware issues at play?

[mfbernstein]

If it won't boot from the DVD (holding C down on bootup), it's probably more than just a disk issue. Try the Apple Hardware Test utility (holding D down with the OS X DVD). Also reset the SMC. Most likely though, you'll need to send it in to Apple.