Mac Book Pro Not Responding

DermoMIO

I'm having a bit of trouble with my mac book Im running OS X 10.5, its been working fine up to a few hours ago when the beach ball refused to go away. At the time all that was running was firefox adium azurues & a fm2010(game). It became completely unresponsive and i was forced to take out the battery in order to try reboot(not my best idea i know). I tried rebooting in safe mode also this was the same unresponsive and just a beach ball when i tried to do anything.

It now wont boot up at all the apple logo and loading circle are there but after about 5mins it just swithces itself off.

Im wondering is my hard drive ready for the bin ? Is there anyway i can get some stuff off it that I may not have backed up or should I just say goodbye to them ?

Any help would be appreciated.

update after an hour i got the installation disc to do a disc utility and i got an error about a few mins in see attached image and what iv typed below :

Invalid node structure
Volume check failed

Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit

1 HFS volume checked
1 volume could not be repaired because of an error

the screen is now blue with the beach bowl spinning, i take it the hard drive is gone yea ?

Greentree_uk

the drive is not necessarily gone, but it may need fixing with more powerful tools like Diskwarrior

muggyog

Yes, looks like a job for diskwarrior.

Have you started it up in single user mode and done a /sbin/fsck -f (disk check)?

patchrick

Top Tip... When you have a dodgy hard drive DO NOT keep accessing it in the hopes it will get better.

It might be still accessible but may not be for much longer. Turn off the macbook, remove the drive and keep it safe. Go and get a new drive and install mac os onto it. Then connect the old hard drive via usb enclosure or whatever and run fsck as the previous poster recommended. Then run Disk Warrior or whatever file recovery program you prefer to try and recover the files.

Unless of course you have an up to date backup. In that case just destroy the drive and restore from your backups.

Patrick

DermoMIO

thanks for the replys I have ordered diskwarrior and should have it tomorrow, I will try the fsck thing tomorrow when my brain is fresh and then run disk warrior. there are only a few things which are on the hard drive that I dont have backed up so hopefully I can retrive them with diskwarrior

DermoMIO

muggyog wrote: »

Yes, looks like a job for diskwarrior.

Have you started it up in single user mode and done a /sbin/fsck -f (disk check)?

I got diskwarrior today and I ran it and it said that there were too many errors on the disk for it to be fixed and that I should backup everything through diskwarriors preview but when I went into the preview and connected an external hard drive there was no option to copy the files

after I ran diskwarrior I ran the single mode thing and typed in that code you have bolded and I get 'invalid node structure (4,30196)' which I have since googled to no joy.

looks like the hard drive is beyond repair. is it difficult to replace a hard drive on mac book pro can any1 tell me ?

muggyog

OK , A few questions.

You ARE booting from the Diskwarrior CD ( pressing the 'C' key on startup ).

When Diskwarrior does its check and gives its results you click the preview button at the bottom of the screen. Do you get a window with two similar panes or do two volumes appear on your desktop?

docentore

DermoMIO wrote: »

I got diskwarrior today and I ran it and it said that there were too many errors on the disk for it to be fixed and that I should backup everything through diskwarriors preview but when I went into the preview and connected an external hard drive there was no option to copy the files

after I ran diskwarrior I ran the single mode thing and typed in that code you have bolded and I get 'invalid node structure (4,30196)' which I have since googled to no joy.

looks like the hard drive is beyond repair. is it difficult to replace a hard drive on mac book pro can any1 tell me ?

it is not hard, just follow the guide on www.ifixit.com
I would actually say that it is easy

Greentree_uk

did you have the external drive attached all the time? if not run diskwarrior again with the external attached from boot.

DermoMIO

muggyog wrote: »

OK , A few questions.

You ARE booting from the Diskwarrior CD ( pressing the 'C' key on startup ).

When Diskwarrior does its check and gives its results you click the preview button at the bottom of the screen. Do you get a window with two similar panes or do two volumes appear on your desktop?

hi yes I'm booting from the disckwarrior cd when pressing the c key.

After it does its check and I click preview it shows me my mac hard drive both the original one and the one it says is the new one but that it cant repair.

DermoMIO

Greentree_uk wrote: »

did you have the external drive attached all the time? if not run diskwarrior again with the external attached from boot.

ah ok no I didnt, thanks I was thinking I maybe should have done that.

muggyog

DermoMIO wrote: »

but that it cant repair.

This is not for repair, this is to copy your data off. There will be a box ( top part ) with a selection triangle. When you have your external drive plugged in, it should be selectable in this box. Select the files you want to copy in the other pane and down the bottom you will see a 'copy' button which should be enabled. See how you get on with this.

DermoMIO

didnt see reply above will rerun disk warrior again

DermoMIO

muggyog wrote: »

This is not for repair, this is to copy your data off. There will be a box ( top part ) with a selection triangle. When you have your external drive plugged in, it should be selectable in this box. Select the files you want to copy in the other pane and down the bottom you will see a 'copy' button which should be enabled. See how you get on with this.

ok I have disk warrior loaded up, I have two options graph & rebuild, and at the top there is directory files & hardware.

I have tried the rebulid but as you said Im not looking to rebuild I want to back up but where am I suppose to find this box with a triangle ?

Greentree_uk

you need to rebuild drive first. and it will then give you the option to preview the drive because it cannot be fixed. then you can copy files across.

DermoMIO

thanks for all replies i couldnt get anything out of diskwarrior so I brought it to bondigroup.ie and they confirmed that the data cant be recovered so what I dont have backed up will be lost, again thanks for all replies and help offered.