Freezing up, rebooting into a white screen

Hi there, I own a 13" 2012 MacBook Pro running OS X Mavericks and Windows 7. Everything was running 100% fine until this morning, when suddenly my browser became unresponsive, I couldn't get the force quit menu to appear, and then finally Finder itself froze. I decided to reboot, but instead of rebooting normally, it played the chime and then displayed a white screen, no icons or anything. None of the startup keys seemed to have any effect, except for resetting the PRAM, which it did, but didn't have any effect.

Strangely, a few hours later, it booted up normally, allowing me to back everything of value up. It still had bouts of freezing up, but after about 15 seconds, it would unfreeze and continue on like normal. Finally, it became completely unresponsive, and I had to reboot, which gave me the white screen again.

While it was working, I ran disk repair, which claimed that everything was fine. I've had two suggestions, that my hard drive is failing, or that my Mac side somehow contracted a virus from the Windows side (which I'm skeptical about). Are any of these likely? Any help would be appreciated.

While it was working, I ran disk repair, which claimed that everything was fine. I've had two suggestions, that my hard drive is failing, or that my Mac side somehow contracted a virus from the Windows side (which I'm skeptical about). Are any of these likely? Any help would be appreciated.

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Let's put the virus thing to bed right now... there are no viruses in the wild that can infect your MacBook Pro. Malware yes, but none that I'm aware of will cause the problem you have.

Next: Disk Utility is good at repairing files and folders and the general file structure of OS X, but it can not repair a disk which has failed electronically or mechanically. Your hard drive may have failed. If your machine is stuck at the white screen, software that can analyze the drive will not work.

Is you MacBook Pro covered under extended Apple Care warranty? (3 years) If so, make an appointment with your local Apple store genius bar and have the Apple tech run diagnostics on it. If it's not covered by Apple Care, you may want to try to repair it yourself. You can take a chance that the hard drive is bad and change it out yourself. There is no guaranty that it's the hard drive though.

The ifixit web site has instructions on how to change the drive. You can buy a replacement drive from most anyplace that sells them.

iFixit: The free repair manual

One more thing: If you have a boot DVD or an external boot drive, try to boot your MacBook Pro with it. That will bypass the internal hard drive and give you a pretty indication that it's bad.

Thanks a lot, I'm not surprised that it's not a virus, that just seemed absurd.

I'm going to take it in next week and have it looked at. I've had a hard drive fail before with similar symptoms to this, I was just surprised it happened so suddenly.