Problems with a Macbook pro any ideas?

    hey,


    recently acquired a macbook pro from my dad that was used very briefly for video editing and some music stuff, i was using it the other day and it was fine, a little slow maybe but otherwise working. My dad went on it the next day to delete some old videos and stuff that was not needed just to free it up for me to start setting it up for music and learning logic and macs in general, when he deleted the first few videos it crashed so he powered it off by holding the power button. This process was repeated several times which is a bad idea to keep forcing the pc to turn off over and over but as a result when you go to login it starts to load get about 3/4 of the way through the load bar and turns off.


    has anyone experienced this before? i intend to take to apple if my colleagues at work cant get it working as they are software developers and work on macs all day every day so i figured they may know! im only asking here to see if anyone experienced this before and if they new a fix!


    TIA

    IIRC, leave it to do its thing once started in safe mode. The OS "repairs itself".


    OK, just dug up some notes I once made:


    Boot in Safe Mode - Shift key whilst booting - be ready and press as soon as hear chime. Release when see Apple logo. The screen should then remain essentially blank. Let OSX then do its thing in the background. It may find and correct various errors. The process could take a few minutes, so be patient and don't use the mouse or keyboard or whatever in that time. OSX should finally bring you out to the Desktop again. To leave Safe Mode, just restart the Mac in the normal way without pressing any keys (from the Apple menu).

    thanks all i will give safe mode a crack when i get in from work! i reset pram and smc and a number of other things, there are no backups on timemachine and it failed to reinstall the os through utilities too.

    Also, for future reference, I find that keeping an image backup harddrive really helps if you do mess it up, or it gets messed up with a virus, etc.


    You can setup the laptop to boot from the external drive and reinstall the image back to the hold laptop's drive.


    If you intend to do music, this will not only ensure you don't lose stuff (backup) but also let you immediately boot up to your computer from another drive if need be.
    (I got an SSD so it's faster for doing this)


    It has saved me a number of times. I even used my MBP to image via Thunderbolt directly to my iMac. So the image is bootable to just about any mac.

    How old is the MacBook Pro?
    Weird that it crashed like this and even weirder that it cannot reinstall from the image partition...
    F'up hard disk with bad sectors maybe?


    Did many stupid things with a Mac and the Mac file system throughout the years but what you are describing never happened to me.


    If you have an extra HD that fits I would try that if your HD can be easily swapped. Also need a MacOS install image of the version still supported by the version of your MBP.

    Thanks for all your advice guys!


    Oddly enough i'm a programmer and app admin but i have no dealings with mac at all so i'm in the dark!


    I tried booting to safe mode but it requires you to log in once its booted up which i tried and it died again at the same point.


    Tried safe mode with the guest user but it is a safari only guest user and so it just tells me to restart to go into guest user, i'm going to see if the tech guys at work can have a crack at it today as our app development team use macs on a daily basis so i figure they may know how to fix it!

    hey all,


    I have good news and bad news!


    The good news is i have figured out what happened and how i need to fix it!


    The bad news is my old man managed to corrupt the hard drive, turning it on and off over and over seems to have corrupted something in the user files and so when it tries to build the user profile on startup, it encounters an error and as such wont load the admin profile, which happens to be the only usable profile on the mac. I tried every suggestion as well as enlisting the help from my mac using cohorts at work and we tried every possible boot up fix you can think of and none of them worked as they either didn't fix the issue or couldn't get far enough in to the boot to start doing the fix!


    I now need to buy a new HDD and flash a version of OSX on to it using target disk from another mac, that should give me a fresh install and this time i will make sure i back everything up unlike the previous owner!


    Thanks for all your help guys!

    I have since wiped the HDD in an attempt to re-load the os, but its badly corrupted. If i boot it up in single user mode it brings up a load of code on the screen which eventually fragments into to un-readable mess and the screen goes all glitchy.


    i think this HDD is beyond repair, and i would like to upgrade to an ssd but id like a 2tb drive in it and a 2tb SSD is going to set me back a fair whack that i just cant afford and so a 7200rpm HDD at around 2tb will quadruple the storage it had previously and will be faster than what was in there previously.


    I think im going to add a bit more RAM in there while i'm at it as well as i have a couple of older laptops indoors that have 4gb of ddr3 RAM in them so i should be able to just add them in to double the existing 4gb.

    I do think the possibility of scrambling the firmware or directory on the drive through your dad's "adding power and taking it away abruptly" is far-more likely than any sort of physical damage. Actually, I'd say it's infinitely more likely.


    This is why I suggested checking out TTP. It's a handy app to have around anyway; you'll be stunned by all the things it can do. Check this review out:


    Moving beyond the Apple Hardware Test or Apple Diagnostics, TechTool Pro 8 offers advanced diagnosis and reporting on every piece of hardware in your Mac to keep it running smoothly.

    Thanks for the suggestion @Monkey_Man, i may purchase that and get it on the system once i have the thing back up and running.


    I think you may have to have that installed on the drive prior to it breaking though so im not sure if it would have helped in this case, i will have a look at it though because for the future it could be a life saver if my dad decides to piss about with the mac again!

    It sure would by the sound of it. :D


    Unless I'm mistaken, you can still conduct repairs on drives regardless of whether or not it was already-installed. You'd just have to be able to run it from another OS installation, assuming you have one on a partition somewhere or on a computer you can hook up.


    For things like data recovery / un-erasing trash etc. 'though, you need to have it installed already so it can periodically create directory backups and a "Trash Usage" plist file. It literally keeps track of where data is even after it's trashed.


    There's just so much it can do it's scary and way beyond my pay grade. One can ignore all the advanced stuff; it's just good to know you have it there for a rainy day or if disaster strikes.

    Totally agree with Monkey_Man, that physical damage was unlikely. Ive been in this situation a few time with the 6 Macs that I run in my house. Resetting the SMC and occasionally the PRAM have fixed that on occasion.


    Just curious, did you ever try to start up in recovery mode.

    The HDD really needed upgrading anyway as it was only 500gb, and there was nothing i wanted to keep on it in the first place! :D


    I literally tried everything from startup that you can, I tried the following:


    -- Resetting SMC
    -- Restting PRAM/NVRAM
    -- Disk Repair from Utilities
    -- Reinstalling the OS from Utilities
    -- TimeMachine back up from Utilities
    -- Booting in single user mode


    I even tried to add a use through terminal using sudo dscl . -create/Users/Admin/username, and that didn't work either as it literally couldn't find the file path for users which only confirmed my suspicion that something in the user build files was corrupted.


    Whenever i tried to boot in to a specific mode (i.e safe mode, single user mode) before i got to the login screen a black screen would flash up for less than a second with an error on it, because i couldn't read it quickly enough i took a video of the screen and paused it at the point the error flashed up and it read, BuildUser () :error building a user of type 0x20010008.


    When i saw this it confirmed it was the user build files that had been corrupted, meaning if any of the startup options required me to login for them to diagnose and fix any errors. If i had known about TT8 (TT9.6 now apparently) i would probably been able to save the drive, but for the same price i can buy a 2tb HDD and get a fresh install.