MacBook Pro won’t startup, recovery partition lost

[Isobelflora]

Hi community! Looking for advice...

i have a MacBook Pro 2011 15” (model number A1286). Obviously this device is quite old but has been maintained well (new battery, several new hard drives in its lifetime and a few other bits).
It has been working fine for a while, I mainly use it for browsing the web and using Pioneer Rekordbox and Logic Pro.
Out of the blue, it will no longer start up. When turning on the laptop, the Apple logo and loading bar appears. The loading bar only gets about 1/4 of the way through and becomes stuck and doesn’t load any further.
The first obvious solution was to boot in recovery mode so I could restore my hard drive from time machine backup. However my recovery partition seems to be lost (I just get the same start up screen as before, Apple logo and loading bar which gets stuck). I then tried internet recovery. After connecting to WiFi and waiting for 5 minutes for internet recovery to complete, my laptop restarts itself then back to square one (Apple logo and stuck loading bar). Safe Mode doesn’t boot either...PRAM and SMC resets done but no change...
I have been in to my local Apple store to visit the Genius Bar and have explained the issue. They ran their diagnostics on my MacBook but all tests came back fine (?) - not an issue with the GPU (I know for MacBooks of this year it has been an issue for some), not the RAM, not the hard drive. Their tests did show however that there is no OSX installed... (I was running OS Yosemite before the issue).
The Apple technician suggested the issue could be my hard drive flex cable, as he couldn’t see any issue with the hard drive itself when running diagnostics.
I have just replaced the flex cable and unfortunately the issue still persists
Any Apple wizards out there who might have some advice? I’m guessing my next option is to replace the hard drive but I’m hesitant to spend the £50 or so replacing this when I’m not certain it will fix the issue..
thanks in advance!

izzie x

 

[pbody]

I have a 2013 MPB 15" and I am having the exact same problem. I can get to the login screen but when I log in the bar won't move. I can't boot into recovery, but I can boot into single user mode. I can't run any diagnostics, but I brought it to an Apple Store and they did and said all tests came back fine. My only difference is that I still have an OS installed. They had two guesses: (1) open it up and try to reseat the SSD drive or (2) something happened with the last 10.14.6 supplemental security update. This update installed automatically for me this week and I'll try to get the logs and post them here if anyone can help (I can still ssh into the machine).

Also, the apple store tried to re-install the OS but they couldn't boot up from a remote drive. My option now is to make a USB linux bootable and try to wipe everything from there.

As Isobelflora said, thanks in advance.

 

[Fishrrman]

VERY FIRST STEP one should ALWAYS take when one can't boot from the internal drive:

Plug in an EXTERNAL bootable drive and see if you can boot to the finder.

Can you?

 

[pbody]

VERY FIRST STEP one should ALWAYS take when one can't boot from the internal drive:

Plug in an EXTERNAL bootable drive and see if you can boot to the finder.

Can you?

I may case I could not. Turns out that the machine wasn't frozen, but it was booting up and I was able to connect via screen sharing. I am still in the middle of fixing, but I was able to turn off SIP after I set the NVRAM to use an external monitor and remove /System/Library/Extensions/NVDAStartup.kext (well, I moved it to another location) and I am now able to boot up with the integrated Intel HD Graphics 4000 video card. I'm leaning towards bad GPU and may be stuck with the integrated card, but I'll still try to (a) update the NVDA drivers and (b) do a fresh install on a cleanly wiped drive (I have backups so data loss is not an issue).