MacBook Pro unable to boot into Macintosh HD

[braydencurtid]

So for the past day I've been unable to boot back into Mac OS X. Yesterday my computer just got really laggy, and would freeze every minute or so. After the 10th or so time of freezing, I manually shut off the laptop (Unibody MacBook Pro), and after rebooting it just froze at the startup screen, with the Apple logo and the spinning gear. I rebooted again, this time holding the option key, and saw that only my BootCamp partition was available.

I tried booting into safe mode, but after 3 hours it was still on the startup screen. I tried single-user mode, but none of the commands I used did anything. I booted using the CD's that came with the mac, and tried using Disk Utility. It still shows the Macintosh HD, so I'm pretty sure it's still there. I tried unmounting then mounting it, I verified and repaired it a few times, but no matter what I did Macintosh HD was unable to be found as a startup disk. Is there something I'm doing wrong?

 

[dcow]

Um.. can you boot to your Windows partition?

If not it might be an issue with the drive

If you can then we've got some work to do.

 

[chas_m]

If the drive can still be seen but just won't mount, I'd attach that machine to a friend's mac via Firewire and back up your user folder ASAP.

 

[braydencurtid]

Um.. can you boot to your Windows partition?

If not it might be an issue with the drive

If you can then we've got some work to do.

Yeah, I can boot into windows. That's what I've been using.

 

[dcow]

Take chas_m's advice.. if you can get that partition to mount on a remote system <--if that doens't make sense read below

Next, do you have any Linux cds lying around? If so then boot up into linux and try to mount the MacHD. To do that click on places at the top (if you are using Ubuntu which I'm assuming you will be) and click the icon for your MacHD. Let us know if you can do that or if the drive even shows up.

You might have a bad partition table.. which fixing is a little beyond our scope here.. Unless you consider yourself up to the task. To do so you have to manually rewrite the table to correct errors and resync it with the actual file system on your drive.

Anyway, let us know what you find so we can move forward.

 

[braydencurtid]

Well, the hard drive is already mounted. The disk utility on the disc says it's mounted to /Volumes/Macintosh HD

I'm still planning on backing it up though.