My 13'' MacBook Pro 2010 running Yosemite suddenly stopped booting today. After I press the power button, I can hear the chime and the computer proceed to go to a blank gray screen immediately. The screen has no apple logo or loading bar.
What I tried as of now:
- Booting in recovery by holding CMD+R — no effect, blank screen
- Booting in single-user mode by holding CMD+S — no effect, blank screen
- Booting in verbose mode by holding CMD+V — no effect, blank screen
- Booting in safe mode by holding Shift — no effect, blank screen
- Booting in hardware diagnosis mode by holding D — no effect, blank screen
- Resetting PRAM by holding CMD+ALT+P+R — reboots, chime again and then blank screen (from this I deduced that the keyboard actually works)
- Resetting SMC by holding Shift+Alt+Control while pressing the power button, then pressing the power button alone — no effect, blank screen
- Choosing another booting drive or recovery partition by holding Alt — no effect, blank screen
Is there something else I could try to get past this gray screen and try other recovery procedures?
Thanks.
EDIT: placing another hard drive in the macbook made it boot properly, so the issue doesn't lie in the rest of the hardware. Now can I recover the data on the malfunctioning drive?
Best Answer
Since you are talking data recovery now, until you get all your data back DO NOT WRITE TO THE DRIVE YOU ARE RECOVERING UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, EVER, OR YOU WILL LOSE ANY AND ALL DATA ON THE DRIVE WITH ABSOLUTELY ZERO CHANCE OF RECOVERY!!!
If you really want to play it safe you should send your drive to a data recovery service. Those are expensive but you have a better chance at getting your data back. A good data recovery service can not only get data out of a drive with messed up metadata, but also a drive suffered from mild to medium damage.
The best bet without contacting a data recovery service is to boot from another device and image your drive off to another storage media. Then you can try to mount the disk image and fish your data out of it. Some Linux-based tools can be very useful.
I would suggest against using that drive ever even after you have recovered all your data. That puppy have suffered from some damage and will have a shortened lifespan. For laptops since physical movement is a daily occurrence I suggest you get an SSD for it. Not only will your laptop load faster the SSD is virtually immune to most physical trauma that can damage a hard drive so it will survive longer. By the way you can force TRIM under El Capitan so there will be no long-term speed and lifespan penalty.