Can not book Mac from CD or USB

[owners4life5]

Hello,

I have a friend with a Macbook Pro (not sure of what month and year) and they consulted me recently to help them out because of a problem they are experiencing.

Whenever my friend brought it over, he said that he opened it and saw a blank white screen. He also claims that it is flashing the question mark and can not find the file system, which I have confirmed since he has left it with me.

Whenever I turn the computer on, I am presented with the flashing question mark and it will sit on this screen indefinitely unless i shut the computer off. Whenever I try to boot into recovery mode, it will let me use disk utility to VERIFY the disk but the repair option is grayed out and I can not select it.

Being it is hard to solve, I thought that I could recover his important files (not many) using a Puppy Linux Live CD, transferring them to a storage, then wiping and reinstalling OS X and replacing the files.

Whenever I try to use the LiveCD-rom, the error message says "No bootable device -- insert boot disk and press any key." The computer will not let you do anything from here.

Whenever i try to boot the Puppy Live CD from USB, the message simply says "boot error" in the same format as the above error and will not let me proceed unless I reboot the computer.

I'm not a big Mac user, I had one once.... but I have been reading a bit on this (not a lot of info on this subject) but something I did find is that this usually happens whenever a Windows installation was previously on the machine - my friend has never had any kind of Windows partition on this computer, ever.

How can I get this darned thing to boot from Linux so I can recover his files and reinstall OS X through the Online Recovery option by pressing "Alt+R" at startup?

Is there a better way around this that I'm not thinking of?

Thanks in advance

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

If you can manage to create a bootable USB drive of the High Sierra (or whatever edition of MacOS he has) installer, that would probably be your best bet. From there you can boot to that USB drive and hopefully be able to restore his MBP drive.

Can you tell if the MBP has a mechanical or solid state storage? If it's an older model with a spinning drive, it's possible the drive is starting to fail. You may need to replace it. You should be able to get some information of the model of MBP from the bottom.

And are you holding the Option key at boot to allow you to select alternate boot devices?

 

[ab298]

Since you can start in Recovery : are you able to use Disk Utility to create a Disk Image of a relevant folder on some external drive, or something similar with Terminal ?.

 

[Samuelsan2001]

Hello,

I have a friend with a Macbook Pro (not sure of what month and year) and they consulted me recently to help them out because of a problem they are experiencing.

Whenever my friend brought it over, he said that he opened it and saw a blank white screen. He also claims that it is flashing the question mark and can not find the file system, which I have confirmed since he has left it with me.

Whenever I turn the computer on, I am presented with the flashing question mark and it will sit on this screen indefinitely unless i shut the computer off. Whenever I try to boot into recovery mode, it will let me use disk utility to VERIFY the disk but the repair option is grayed out and I can not select it.

Being it is hard to solve, I thought that I could recover his important files (not many) using a Puppy Linux Live CD, transferring them to a storage, then wiping and reinstalling OS X and replacing the files.

Whenever I try to use the LiveCD-rom, the error message says "No bootable device -- insert boot disk and press any key." The computer will not let you do anything from here.

Whenever i try to boot the Puppy Live CD from USB, the message simply says "boot error" in the same format as the above error and will not let me proceed unless I reboot the computer.

I'm not a big Mac user, I had one once.... but I have been reading a bit on this (not a lot of info on this subject) but something I did find is that this usually happens whenever a Windows installation was previously on the machine - my friend has never had any kind of Windows partition on this computer, ever.

How can I get this darned thing to boot from Linux so I can recover his files and reinstall OS X through the Online Recovery option by pressing "Alt+R" at startup?

Is there a better way around this that I'm not thinking of?

Thanks in advance

It sounds like the drive or drive cable is dead, if the drive is dead then booting from an external drive is probably your best bet but use OSX rather than Linux. If the drive is dead he may well have lost his files, if he doesn't have a back up then he's learned a valuable lesson.

 

[Fishrrman]

It would sure help if you queried the owner for the following info and posted it here:
- model of MBPro
- year of manufacture
- OS it was running

IF it's a MacBook Pro with a CD drive, then I'll guess that it might be possible to open the back, remove the hard drive, place the drive into a USB3/SATA dock, and access it that way. As mentioned above, the hard drive ribbon cable can sometimes fail, mimicking a failed internal drive. Replace the cable and it could go back to normal. This can be tested by placing the drive into a USB3/SATA dock, connecting it to the MacBook, and attempt to boot that way. If it boots right up, I'd replace the cable first.