Help macbook please!

Aprilsunshine

help please! my macbook just died this minute I'm on an ancient old dell now and I looked at apple website for help but nothing worked and it is lit up but a question mark is flashing at me....how bad is that?!

Its just humming with a blank grey screen.

~Rebel~

Aprilsunshine wrote: »

help please! my macbook just died this minute I'm on an ancient old dell now and I looked at apple website for help but nothing worked and it is lit up but a question mark is flashing at me....how bad is that?!

Its just humming with a blank grey screen.

Flashing question mark means your machine is having trouble recognising the hard drive, and the operating system on it.

This can have varying degree's of seriousness.

If you have your installation disk, pop that in and boot into it by restarting your machine holding down the C key till you get to the spinning gear. When you're into it, go to utilities at the top, and pick disk utility. There, select your volume (if its recognised - fingers crossed here!), and try to repair the disk, as well as repairing disk permissions. If it lets you actually see the disk in the first place, thats a massively positive thing. If it doesn't see the disk, then you'll most likely need a hardware fix. Wherever you take it to may be able to do some data recovery, but it totally depends on the case and the extent of the corruption/damage.

Good luck!

Aprilsunshine

Thanks a million - I have the disk but its in Dublin and I'm not...

do you think leaving it for a few days will harm its chances of recovery?

~Rebel~

Aprilsunshine wrote: »

Thanks a million - I have the disk but its in Dublin and I'm not...

do you think leaving it for a few days will harm its chances of recovery?

nah, shouldn't do really, particularly if its just sitting there switched off.

What you can do as well, as a quick test, is to boot up holding down the 'alt/option' key and see what it gives you. This brings up a screen showing what bootable drives it see's. If it see's your Macintosh HD there, thats very positive. If it doesn't show anything, then you'll just have to hang tough till you can get the disks.

Aprilsunshine

nope nothing....oh dear.

Thanks for the help - I'll give the disk a shot but I'm not too hopeful.
Cheers

~Rebel~

Aprilsunshine wrote: »

nope nothing....oh dear.

Thanks for the help - I'll give the disk a shot but I'm not too hopeful.
Cheers

Bugger, good luck anyway!

pierrot

If it's making a clicking noise as well it's bad news mate. Happened me two months ago, fried harddrive, no data recovered.

Rb

At least replacing the harddrive isn't too hard on a mac.