Late 2006 MacBook will not boot; Disk Utility doesn't seem to help

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be9110

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My Intel MacBook (late 2006 model) is not able to boot up, and I need a few suggestions as to how I should proceed.

A bit of background: I put the computer into hibernate two days ago (though not plugged in). I come back to it today and notice that it does not power up. I let it charge up for an hour and come back to it. It is able to go to the login screen and get me to my desktop, but I notice that whenever I clicked something, it froze the program and a spinning rainbow appeared. This got to the point where the entire system was unresponsive. Thus, I did a restart. The gray screen with an Apple logo/waiting icon did not do anything for several minutes and hung.

I reset the PRAM, but that did not fix anything.

I used the installation disk to get into the Disk Utility program. After several tries, it was able to recognize that I had an included hard drive but was not able to mount the volume. The "Macintosh HD" on the sidebar in Disk Utility was grayed out, presumably because it was not able to mount.

I first tried going to the Partition tab to change over the configuration from "Current" to "1 Partition", then back to "Current" to see if the volume would appear as mountable. This did not work and remained grayed out.

I then tried going to the First Aid tab to repair the disk. The output of that was the following:

Code: 
[B]Verify and Repair disk "Macintosh HD"[/B]
Invalid Volume Header
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Invalid node structure
Rebuilding Catalog B-tree.

This took a few minutes before failing.

My next option was to try seeing what I could do via Terminal. The partitions appeared in the /dev folder, but I was not able to mount them. I tried the command /sbin/fsck_hfs -yprd /dev/disk0s2 with no luck (disk0s2 is the "Macintosh HD" volume of the computer's hard drive).

After doing a bit of preliminary research, I'm getting the impression that several of the first bytes of the hard drive have been corrupted and that is where the file structure resides. Disk Utility and its command-line equivalent seem to be of limited use.

Does anyone have any recommendations besides DiskWarrior? I was wondering if it would be possible to somehow use dd (and nc over a network) within the installation disk's Terminal to transfer a nearly exact image file of the hard drive to another computer where it could possibly be examined and rescued that way. Anyone have any thoughts as to what I should do next? I can post details or more thorough explanations of the above as necessary. Thanks in advance!

For what it's worth, the model of the hard drive is Toshiba MK8034GSX.
 
be9110 said:
Does anyone have any recommendations besides DiskWarrior? I was wondering if it would be possible to somehow use dd (and nc over a network) within the installation disk's Terminal to transfer a nearly exact image file of the hard drive to another computer where it could possibly be examined and rescued that way.
Click to expand...


I don't know why you would want something besides DiskWarrior as that is a very logical next step. Even if you do get a clone and restore the image to a brand new drive it will still not mount. So even in this case you will need a very powerful directory structure tool like DiskWarrior to get the drive to mount either way.
 
djackmac said:
I don't know why you would want something besides DiskWarrior as that is a very logical next step. Even if you do get a clone and restore the image to a brand new drive it will still not mount. So even in this case you will need a very powerful directory structure tool like DiskWarrior to get the drive to mount either way.
Click to expand...

One other option I was considering before going the $100 route was to make an entire copy of the hard drive using GNU ddrescue. Then I could try working on it with a recovery program like foremost. Would ddrescue be a viable option at least to get the data copied?
 
IMHO: You can work on it, or a copy of it, with anything you wish, but, in the end, you'll need to use DiskWarrior in order to save it. DW is a tool that, sooner or later, every Mac owner will need.
 
I'll echo the others - you need Disk Warrior.
Strike that - YOU don't need Disk Warrior, but your hard drive does ... :D
 
Indeed. DW is an investment up there with "get an external HD and clone your drive daily!" Has saved my hiney more times then I can count.

Also, if you do not have it, the Kool Kidz [Tm.--Ed.] will laugh at you.




You do not want the Kool Kidz laughing at you, do you?

--J.D.
 
Well, an interesting thing happened. I was waiting a few days for a SATA to USB converter to ship, and that arrived today. I plugged it into my second laptop (which has Ubuntu on it), and the drive's main volume mounted right away. Ubuntu was able to recognize it. (Umm... so why can't OS X 10.4?) I could see a full listing of all of the files on my Mac's hard drive.

That's the good news. The bad news is that the drive wants to unmount after about 10 minutes, making recovery very difficult. I'm going to try to copy my important data first, then see about making an image file. However, it seems that not all of the files are fully readable, making me think that a few bad sectors do exist somewhere on the drive.

Any thoughts as to what actually happened to my hard drive? I seem to be in a lucky position at the moment, but I'm also getting the sense that it could die at any minute.
 
The program ddrescue was able to get about 7/8 of the hard drive before it started to effectively become unresponsive. (More than I was expecting.) Judging by the noises, it's now a problem with the heads. The next step is to refrigerate the hard drive to see if that does anything.

So... what does DiskWarrior do exactly? Everyone has said that I need it but hasn't said why I need it. Even if DiskWarrior were to repair the volume's structure, I'm thinking that the hard drive's possibly imminent failure would have made it for naught anyway.
 
Your first post most definitely led us to believe that your directory was corrupted. Thus DW.

Only in your post of 6/22 did you reveal info that possibly the HD was on it's way south.
 
be9110 said:
So... what does DiskWarrior do exactly? Everyone has said that I need it but hasn't said why I need it. Even if DiskWarrior were to repair the volume's structure, I'm thinking that the hard drive's possibly imminent failure would have made it for naught anyway.
Click to expand...

Here

--J.D.
 
SGilbert said:
Your first post most definitely led us to believe that your directory was corrupted. Thus DW.

Only in your post of 6/22 did you reveal info that possibly the HD was on it's way south.
Click to expand...
Well, bad sectors and the fact that the volume information was corrupted led me to think that it didn't magically happen on its own. Usually small things tend to become bigger things given enough time. I assumed that there was something wrong with the hardware, hence erring on the side of caution and making an image of the hard drive before anything else could happen to it. DiskWarrior probably could have done the same thing and a bit more later on, but why not use free and open-source?

The money that I could have spent on DW with a failing hard drive was instead spent on a new 500 GB hard drive. So there :)
 
Get Disk Warrior...
There is nothing 'free and open-source' that will repair your hard drive directory like Disk Warrior.
You might have got that hard drive to work again, without needing to use your backup.
Disk Warrior is indisputably money well-spent.
Till next time -
So there :)
 
DeltaMac said:
You might have got that hard drive to work again, without needing to use your backup.
Click to expand...

Yes, might. Or, my hard drive could have fantastically failed one week later (as it actually did). Software, no matter how great it is, can't fix physical hardware problems. Logically, if you think that your drive might have even a slim chance of failing, you would probably first make up a backup image and then do restoration work off of that backup image. Sorry, it seems common sense to me. And if the hard drive can't even survive getting all of the data copied off of it, DW isn't going to magically fix it, now is it?

(Assuming that my drive was in better condition, I would agree that DW would have been excellent for my purposes.)
 
be9110 said:
Yes, might. Or, my hard drive could have fantastically failed one week later (as it actually did). Software, no matter how great it is, can't fix physical hardware problems. Logically, if you think that your drive might have even a slim chance of failing, you would probably first make up a backup image and then do restoration work off of that backup image. Sorry, it seems common sense to me. And if the hard drive can't even survive getting all of the data copied off of it, DW isn't going to magically fix it, now is it?

(Assuming that my drive was in better condition, I would agree that DW would have been excellent for my purposes.)
Click to expand...

But at the same time you have a bad hard drive that does not mount. If you are able to re-image from the failing drive to the new drive, you will most likely still have a drive that does not mount. Then DW will once again be your best bet of getting the drive to mount and getting access to the data.
 
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