02-24-2011, 11:02 PM

I've had a few power outages before but I think this time did it. My computer was on normally with nothing installing or anything updating and it powered off without shutting down. Now I can't turn it back on.

I'm on a Macbook Pro running dual boot with both windows 7 and mac with boot camp. I can get to the page where you can select which operating system you want to boot in but once the starting windows page comes up it just freezes and I can't get past it (same for booting in mac, it freezes at the page with the circular loading bar). If I try running with the "windows startup repair mode" a bar loads for a while, then a green bar comes up with the windows logo and then after that it all goes black. So I looked this problem up and I'm assuming that my boot partition is damaged. I have a windows 7 and mac os cd but none of them can load in. Would a usb, external cd drive work?
I also read online to try using a Linux cd. I have that too, so should I try that?

And I'm guessing there's no way to save any of my files on the hard drive?

02-25-2011, 05:59 AM

This is mostly conjecture on my part, but my guess is that your computer is mostly fine, and that the data on your hard drive is either mostly fine or completely fine.

Generally during an electrical outage, you computer would be fine if all that happened is that the electricity went out and then came back on.

But, unfortunately, with most electrical outages, a large electrical surge accompanies the outage, usually when the electricity comes back on. The damage that occurs when your computer is hit by a surge usually is completely hardware (not software) related.

It is a good sign that your Mac starts up and displays anything at all. That probably means that all of the soldered-on components on your motherboard are fine. My guess is that your RAM has been damaged, but I could easily be wrong about this.

In any case, the best thing for you to do is to take your Mac to an Apple Store and have it looked at.

In the future, you may want to consider purchasing a good UPS (uninterruptible power supply). A good one will cost about $130 and last for years, but it will pay for itself if you only really need it once.

___________________________________________

Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)

Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance
OS X Maintenance And Troubleshooting
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02-25-2011, 11:04 AM

wow, ok I relied on a certain comp sci. prof. to try the windows/mac cds and he said that none of them worked

So, today I tried the cds myself just to check and the windows repair cd worked! The thing is that he didn't know about the holding down the option part to get to the boot choosing mode... yeah. So if anyone else has this problem, I just put in the cd, held down the option key at the white page, waited for the cd picture to come up and then I just clicked repair. Everything's all good and back to normal. None of my files were wiped, it's exactly as it was before. =D