Broken harddirve, what to do next?

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Hi all,

So I've had my MacBook Pro since last February- when I bought it I decided to upgrade the RAM to 16gb and the hard drive to a 128gb crucial SSD. I kept the old factory mac harddrive and have been using it as an external using a SATA cable.

All was good up until tuesday of this week. One morning it was working fine- closed my laptop to go to work then 15 minutes later arrived and went to enter my password. The thing froze and then I had to force restart. Upon the forced restart I just got the classic "flashing gray file" with a question mark.

After googling, youtubing and looking on here I tried everything to see if I could repair my SSD but it seems to just be dead. When I access the disk utility feature booting up into safe mode (IDK the name, but holding shift on boot), my mac can see that I have my crucial drive installed but it gives no information and I cannot verify disk. So I'm guessing that's that fried. Unless anyone else can recommend anything??

I have my factory hard drive that I can reinstall into the mac that I could reinstall OSX onto, but I need the back up information on it. So what I'm thinking of doing is copying my backup drive onto another computer, swapping out the back up with the SSD, then copying the data onto another back up drive and using time capsule. I want to know if there is a simpler way that I can do this- can I just install my backup and reinstall the OS whilst protecting the back up data on there or will I have to do the faffing with backing up my back up?

Cheers for any help!
 
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Hi Wmaph12

Sorry to hear about this.
Is the SSD definitely fried? I was just thinking that if you have a backup on your external drive then maybe trying to do a clean re-install of OSX onto the SSD then using that backup to restore everything afterwards could be an option?

- Simon
 
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Silver M1 iMac 512/16/8/8 macOS 11.6
What operating system? If OS X.7 or later go into Receovery and check out the drive with Repair Disk and see what is reported. If OS X.6 use the install DVD to do this. Alas hard drives do fail, including SSDs. Have had a G.Skill Falcon dead brand new in its box, and Kingston V200 last 90 days. Have got the best results from OCZ and OWC drives.
 
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Hi Wmaph12

Sorry to hear about this.
Is the SSD definitely fried? I was just thinking that if you have a backup on your external drive then maybe trying to do a clean re-install of OSX onto the SSD then using that backup to restore everything afterwards could be an option?


- Simon

I am not 100% sure that it is fried, just an assumption given that the system can't access any info like bytes used etc. The other thing is I still have a hope that I could potentially access data off it one way or another once it was out. Whilst I do have a back up, the data is 2 months old and I have done some work that I would prefer to get back if I can (more fool me for not regularly backing up!)

What operating system? If OS X.7 or later go into Receovery and check out the drive with Repair Disk and see what is reported. If OS X.6 use the install DVD to do this. Alas hard drives do fail, including SSDs. Have had a G.Skill Falcon dead brand new in its box, and Kingston V200 last 90 days. Have got the best results from OCZ and OWC drives.

It's the OSX maverick (just did the update a couple of weeks ago). In recovery mode I can get to see the drive which is installed, but the repair option is greyed out. Any ideas how else I could try and check this (terminal commands maybe?).

Cheers!
 

chscag

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It's the OSX maverick (just did the update a couple of weeks ago). In recovery mode I can get to see the drive which is installed, but the repair option is greyed out. Any ideas how else I could try and check this (terminal commands maybe?).

If the repair option is grayed out in Disk Utility while in recovery mode, the drive is likely not repairable and should be replaced. If you have an older install DVD (Leopard, Snow Leopard) you can try booting with it and see if you can access the drive. However, if you couldn't repair it in Recovery mode, it likely is not repairable as I stated above.

Check your warranty status on the drive. Most drives are warranted for two years which means you may be able to get a RMA and a replacement. Hopefully, you've been making backups and will not lose any data.
 

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