I'm trying to fix someone's Macbook, and I am a Windows user so I'm having trouble confirming that his hard drive is ruined or unfixable which is what I think is the problem.
When you boot it up it takes you to OS X Utilities, and when I try to press "Reinstall OS X", when prompted to select a disk to install OS X, the hard drive displays "This disk is locked." When I go into disk utilities and try to repair disk, I eventually get "live file system repair is not supported"
I assume this is a sign that the hard drive is failed and in need of replacement, but I'm looking to make sure there's nothing I can do to fix it.
Also, I know on Windows I could boot from a USB device or CD, (say I have Windows installed on a flash drive or a Ubuntu disk), and I'm wondering what my options are there if I don't want to just buy a new hard drive. I'd really like to be able to boot OS X from a flash drive and simply use that as the internal hard drive, is that at all possible?
Best Answer
Start up the computer holding the option key, which takes you to the Startup manager; that will show you your boot options. It should show at least the recovery hd, possibly even the main drive. If the main drive is an option, select it, then before hitting enter, hold down both the Cmd key and the "S" key. That will boot you into single user mode, which should allow you to access the drive unhindered, outside of OS X.
A black screen will appear, followed by a bunch of text. At the end of the scrolling, follow the instructions listed.
At the prompt type the following then hit enter:
If there are errors, it will say the file system appears ok, but then there will be "the file system has been modified". If so, repeat the command until it just says the file system is ok.
Then at the command prompt, run
This mounts the root drive as writeable, and will remove damaged or unnecessary files. It may or may not tell you that some files have been removed. Regardless, at the next prompt, run
reboot. Allow the system to restart unhindered. It may boot up into the main drive on its own then. If not, it will boot back into recovery, but you may have better luck in recovery now after repairing first in single user.