Macbook not starting up!

Wail

Wail

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Wail
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Hi all,

My Macbook is acting up and I am in the last day of submission of my Masters' report.

All of a sudden it would not restart, and it just gives me a white screen with a folder icon in the middle that has a question mark in it.

What is this, and how can I get my machine to run again .. without losing my data, which I can't replicate in the next 24 hours.

Thank you for any feedback.


I can't access the internet all too often, as I am now using someone's else machine which is not at my disposal. Please submit any hints and tips to what I can do here ... thanks ... and I will check every so often.
 
Hi mate,

it means that your start up drive can't be found or there may be hardware issues, it has potential to be serious, do you have all your stuff backed up? Is it a new uni body macbook?
 
Hi,

I have everything backed up, as of Wednesday. Thursday I did no work what so ever, and today was working on it when all of a sudden this happened.

So, I have one day's work not backed-up .. but that's one day too many, as I only have 2 more days to submit this, and I can't afford a day's work gone.

I am not too sure what the problem may be, I have been searching and it seems like that as you've said, the start-up isn't found. I have tried to boot from CD but that didn't go.

It seems a quick run down to the Apple Centre tomorrow, otherwise I will need to retype (from memory) everything from today.

It's going to be a very long night tomorrow.
 
Sorry to hear it mate.

Yeah, take it up to the apple centre and get those genius types on it.

Hope it's alright

T.
 
Thank you so much for the tips.

Seems like it's going to be a rough couple of days for me.
 
if it wont boot from disk its prob a hardware issue. If you can take the drive out put it into a caddy and see if you can access the info that way.

If not sorry to say you may have to reinstall osx that means you will loose all your info :(

Take it to the apple center see what they say.

I love macs but when they go wrong its a nightmare trust me my old macbook went down on me im lucky i work for a large computer shop and have tech guys to my disposal.

good luck
 
Like I said in the pm target mode to your other mac and you should be able to just read it straight off and carry on. If you had been nearer you could have popped round. Above should allow you to copy everything off your machine into a temporary folder on your other machine. Then reinstall the broken one after your work is in and copy the stuff back. If you can copy off EVERYTHING into a temp folder then I can help you restore it later, obviously your disitation is more important now.
 
dlphotography said:
If not sorry to say you may have to reinstall osx that means you will loose all your info :(
Click to expand...

Not quite true surely... :thinking: ... if you do an Archive and Install... :shrug:



I do hope you get yourself sorted in time to get your work finished Wail... ;)






:p
 
have you got a firewire to firewire cable? if so, you could try to start up the macbook in disk mode. connect it to another computer fw-fw and hold down T when you start it.
 
Thank you everyone for the help. I am off to Apple now to see if I can salvage something. Otherwise I will be working through the nights until Monday to complete my paper.

Again, thank you all for the tips. I will post an update once I am back from Apple and have taken a break.
 
Update

I just spent the best part of the morning trying to salvage my machine. Apple Swansea were more than helpful.

Having run all sort of tests in their showroom, even going so far as testing my hard drive on another Macbook .. sadly it seems that my Macbook circuit board, and my hard drive are both fried.

The only option I now have, to get my data, is to try one of the data recovery companies, which I will call on Monday.

As for my report, which I have to submit on Monday by 3:00pm at the latest; well, I am working to make up for the lost data (have some friends doing some data entry for me) and will be typing like a squirrel on steroids over the next day. I just hope this doesn't affect the quality of my report .. if it does, then this is going to be one very expensive lesson.

To all of you here, who have tried so hard to help me, thank you very much.

Come Monday, I will need to decide on what to do with my existing Macbook, and the data on it. Until then, I can't allow myself to focus on this issue anymore.

Again, thank you to all who have replied here and in PM. Your support has been overwhelming.
 
Get on with your dissertation now but once it is all sorted out give me a shout and we can look at options re your macbook ie. splitting it to sell as parts, locating a suitable motherboard and replacing that and/or the hard drive (maybe upgrading that at the same time). Repairing it will be the most obvious and you can pick up a motherboard from the states for about $300 then a 250Gb 7200 rpm HD for about £70 (this would speed up your computer too) !

Anyway good luck with your work and I hope this does not mess it up too much
 
Hi everyone,

First off, thank you for all the good wishes, support, and tips.

Now that my studies are over, I need to get this matter sorted out. I have started a separate thread on this since it is now certain the hard drive is dead, but not too sure about the motherboard.

Again, thank you all for the quick responses and help .. now I need to sort out the best course of action.
 
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