2011 15" MBP won't boot

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Running stock everything, including single boot system. Havn't made any changes at all in the past couple of weeks as far as uninstalling or installing software. Last week the machine wouldn't come out of sleep or hibernate (whichever it reverts to when left open for a while) without closing and opening the screen a couple of times and hitting the power button. Today I powered up the machine and a grey progress bar appeared at the bottom of the grey screen. The bar progresses about 1cm across the screen, freezes there, starts over, goes 1cm over again then shuts down automatically. It will not let me boot by holding C down with the setup CD in the drive. I've tried booting in safe mode and resetting the PRAM. I then called Apple Care and he had me do the same things and they all failed. It will let your boot into the diagnostic mode by holding D while booting. However, the AHT will freeze near the end of the test and freeze there until you force shutdown. It freezes near the end of the quick and long tests.

On top of this our backup external drive failed a few months ago and we havn't been able to afford a new one so we have no backups of the machine. Any ideas of what is going on? The Apple Care rep said I have to go to a Genius Bar and let them work on it. I'm a bit ****** to say the least when my 4 year old thinkpad I throw all over the country runs like a top and our new $2200 top of the line machine is sitting in it's original box dead.
 

BrianLachoreVPI


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March 2011 15" MBP 2.3GHz i7 Quad Core 8GB Ram | Mid 2011 27" iMac 3.4 GHz i7 16 GB RAM 2 TB HDD
I think I'd be hightailing it to the Genius Bar.
 
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After a 2 hour drive we dropped our MBP off at the genius bar. A bit later he came back out to the floor and said that the HD has failed and requires replacement. He wasn't sure if it was a physical failure or just corrupted. He said he didn't hear any clicking or other signs showing physical failure.

He said that he has no way of recovering any data there and that the drive would need to be sent off to a lab for any recovery. We've pretty much just lost a couple hundred pictures that weren't backed up since our external drive failed several months ago. I thought we had more time to come up with a new backup drive, apparently not. It sucks that the pictures are gone but I'm wandering if it's worth trying to recover some data myself.

There are some programs that run at the DOS level and can sometimes recover corrupted drives. You can't even hold down "C" on the MBP to access the setup disk so I'm wandering if the failure is beyond just corruption. I could get a cable to fit the drive as an external drive for like $12 and run that program to try and recover some pictures. Being that the box is on the way to send the MBP back to Apple for the HDD replacement (The genius's at the Genius Bar didn't have the correct HDD and sent me packing 2 hours back home!) so if I decided to do that I would have to hold off on sending the MBP back to Apple. If it's doubtful that I can recover anything, or a physical failure is suspected, then we'll just cut our loses and send it back to Apple and start all over agian.

We've had two HDD's fail in a matter of months so dropping a couple hundred bucks on a backup drive is now a huge priority so this doesn't happen again... My wife is an aspiring pro photographer so a Drobo is raid array is going to be the way to go to protect projects but for now anything is better than nothing. I'm looking at either a 1TB Time Capsule or different external HDD that maybe my PC can back up on as well.
 
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2010 i3 27" 16gb Ram
If I were you I would look at something like this

Synology Network Attached Storage - NEW NAS Experience

under products there are several models to choose from they will even handel time machine backups. I run an older one called the ds209+ an it is quick. the 411+ is one of the faster ones in a reasonable price range then just load it up with drives...
 
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Those Synology products look great, definitely something to look into.

Do you guy's think it is worth attempting to try to repair the drive with DiskWarrior before sending it back to Apple? I'm wandering if it's worth a shot or if the odds of getting anywhere are really against me. I'm not sure how to hook up the drive to a working comp because we only have 1 Mac. I have a PC and I'm wandering if I could get a SATA-USB adapter and run something on my PC to repair the drive externally. Or maybe I could find someone else with a mac and boot ours up in target disk mode and attempt to read it that way.

This video that I found show's exactly what our MBP is doing: YouTube - ‪Macbook Pro Won't Boot! Help!‬‏

Sending it off to Apple will fix the problem but will not get my pictures back. Is it worth wasting a week of getting the machine back and running trying to repair and recover the pictures off of the drive or does that video show issues DiskWarrior won't be able to touch? Thanks for the input guy's!
 
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From the looks of it I am guessing the drive has a bad platter. do you hear the drive spin up at all when turned on?
 
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It sounds like it's spinning up as normal but when the progress bar is up at the boot screen it's making a very slight clicking noise like it's trying to look for the OS or something. It doesn't sound like any physically failed HDD that I've had with the more distinct and louder clicking.
 

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