Macbook won't boot

[flyguy451]

Hi,

I know the information is probably somewhere here and I'm going to do a search right after I finish posting this but just in case there's someone with the info at hand....sat down at the Macbook to hit the Interweb and Firefox froze - spinning beachball - so I left it and had lunch, thinking it would right itself soon enough. I came back after lunch and still had the spinning beachball, in fact the whole machine had frozen. I could move the mouse pointer which was the beachball, couldn't get to finder to quit the process, or see what was going on so I tried to reboot it. Now all I get is the pale blue screen. Can't do a PRAM reset or get it to start in target mode either. One thing I noticed is that there is an audible clicking noise like a metronome during the initial few seconds after I power on. After a few minutes the screen shows a file folder with a flashing question mark. Have I lost my hard drive or any suggestions?

Thanks

 

[iBookG4user]

It sounds like your hard drive is toast. Can you boot off of your restore disk?

 

[thejadedmonkey]

the clicking sound is your hard drive F'ed up. The folder icon is the mac not able to find/read the OS files off of the hard drive. In short, you're screwed, and I hope you had a good backup.

the only think that may work is if you boot up off of the install CD's and try repairing the disk, but that'd be a very long shot

http://www.apple.com/support/macbook/

 

[rosalindavenue]

Almost certainly a dead hard drive. I just got my ibook back after the same symptoms-- the hard drive was so far gone the repairman couldn't copy any data. Interestingly, it would boot with the system disk, and the harddrive passed the short version of the hardware test. (I didnt try the complete hardware test before taking it in). But the symptoms and the sound are dead giveaways.

 

[flyguy451]

Thanks for the quick replies. I can boot from the install disk and both the short and extended hardware tests show no problems. After multiple attempts I did manage to boot into target mode but for some reason it doesn't show an icon on my iMac desktop. I do have a backup although it's not from yesterday so I'll be missing some data so I'm still hoping I might get lucky and be able to get it to work as an external after replacing it.

Here's the funny part...checked my receipt (cause it's been about a year) and found out that my one year anniversary was up on May 27th. Yep, that's right, it failed 6 days after the warranty expired! Oh well, drives are cheap.

 

[flyguy451]

Update:

I never did get the failed drive to work one last time.

However, due to Backup and idisk, I lost almost no data. A big PITA definitely but mitigated to a great extent by knowing that all my photos, music, documents and especially my addressbook were safe.

Advice to all....DO A BACKUP NOW!