AS with you previous post. But you give more information. It has been my experience that when you drain a battery fully--a practice one does to "reset" the chip in the battery so it will charge fully--the actual computer will try to "save" where everything is an your volume will not be damaged.
Apparently, you damaged your volume. In your other post, you state "cannot repair" with regards to, I assume, you using
Disk Utility to repair your volume?
In that case I have some good news . . . and some not good news.
1.
Fully charge the battery--this you will do when you do the rest of the stuff. I have noticed--having recently replaced a battery--that sometimes a MacBook does not "like" a battery fully drained charging. Or I had a bad battery which I sent back. Be that as it may, whilst you do what I instruct, you might as well rule this problem out. I doubt that is it since in your other post you
imply you can boot on your
Installation Disk.
2.
Get DiskWarrior "But it is $99!!1!" Yeah. But it is a powerful program that recovers volumes that no other program can recover. It is an investment. Get it. Then boot on it, try to repair:
If it does, move on to the next steps. If not, it will create a disk image or temporary "picture" of your hard drive. THAT has your data. Move to the next step.
3.
Get an External-HD. Back in the day, the "
did you back up your hard drive?" question merited beating the questioner with an aluminum bat because backing up required, DVDs, CDs, and, even "Floppy Disks." And about two days. NOW you can do it in minutes. IF you had
cloned your drive, you would chortle, boot on your external clone, copy it to your Internal HD, surf your dolphin porn,
et cetera.
We have all been there. IF
DiskWarrior fixed your problem, confirm it with
Disk Utility, hook up your Ex-HD and clone your drive. I
had thought
Time Machine would do this. It does not. A "Clone" is as exact a copy of "you" as you can make and, importantly, it is "bootable." Gurus have told me that
TM still does not make "bootable" clones. One day, your Int-HD will fail. It would be nice if you could boot your MacBook off
something while you wait for your replacement, yes?
IF
DiskWarrior can only produce an "image" you need to put it SOMEWHERE. Put it on your new External HD. Then perform a clean installation of your OS, pull your data back, sacrifice a virgin, and relax.
4.
Get a Cloning Program: I use
SuperDuper! because it was rated the most exact cloner. In other words, when I frell up something, clean my HD, send over my clone--clone my Int HD from the Ext HD, I do not have to reload all of my software because they all think I stole it nor do I lose my settings. Others recommend
Carbon Copy Cloner and there are others. You can then clone your Int-HD daily. Most--
SD does--will allow you to simply "smart" update which simply updates what changes, so it takes about 8 minutes to clone ~200 GB.
"But I am poor! I just sold my puppy to 'medical experimentation!'"
Well, there is one other thing you can try. I do not do this anymore . . . because I have
DW and clone my HD . . . and I am magNIfIcent. However, it use to be called "
Archive and Install." This is simply having your
Installation Disk install a FRESH OS around what you have. You can then
try to pull over your data then delete your old OS, but it is a pain in the butt.
Finally, there is a possibility that your HD is failing. I had that happen years ago when a background program crashed out of nowhere after I returned home after seeing a friend who spend the weekend dealing with his PC HD dying. He threw a brick at me when I asked him if he backed-up his data.
I put in
DW, found a frelled volume, created the image, and--because I did not have an Ext-HD because I am, basically, an idiot, slowly copied everything to, not DVDs, but CDs. I tried, then, to
Archive and Install, but the HD was then DEAD. COMPLETELY.
The reason I bore you with that is IF your HD is
dying you have to act fast to save your data. The more you run it, the more likely it will die for good. That is a worse case scenario, but, you know, just when you think it cannot get worse, U2 releases another album.
--J.D.
