Mac help - will not boot

[Conquistador]

Got a Mac at work which nobody could remember the password for for a couple of years. I managed to basically reinstall iOS by getting into the recovery mode during startup and when that was all done, it wanted to do a couple of years worth of big updates which I did. Restarted the thing after doing the updates and since then it just won't boot.

It's stuck on the white boot screen and the bar never reaches the end. Left it on all night and still didn't load by the morning. Any advice? I've tried going into recovery mode again but it's just not having it.

 

[grober]

How to diagnose a Mac that will not boot after updating - CNET

 

[bolide]

Easiest way to deal with all OS X problems is to have an external boot drive. If it boots off that, the problem's with the internal drive / OS. If it won't boot off the external, there's a hardware problem. Hardware could be bad RAM, bad HD, etc

If you have an external boot drive you can build & keep a boot system as a disc image. Then, if a machine has problems, just restore the image on to it and reboot

I used to find that a Mac Pro would take 9 minutes to restore complete boot drive & applications off an external drive via Firewire 800. It's a lot quicker than doing a full reinstallation & updates every time

Carbon Copy Cloner makes creating & restoring disc images very easy

Nick Froome

 

[brucemillar]

Could be the boot drive needs repairing. Start it into Disc Utilities and follow the prompts. You may to run repair several times.

Sent from my iPhone using MBClub UK

 

[spinaltap]

It's likely that the Directory is damaged (yes, Mac's do have a Directory).

If you can get to an AppleStore, buy a copy of DiskWarrior...

DiskWarrior 5 - The Disk Utility for Mac Disk Repair, Mac Directory Repair, Mac Disk Recovery, Mac Data Recovery

An additional utility is to also buy TechToolPro...

https://www.micromat.com/products/techtool-pro

While the price might make you wince initially you won't when things do go wrong.

 

[John]

I would try another recovery.

Could well be a duff hard disk.

 

[bolide]

This is why booting off an external hard drive makes so much sense. You bypass the internal drive completely so you're checking the hardware - motherboard, RAM & etc

If it boots OK from an external drive then the hardware is OK. If it doesn't, zap the PRAM and remove any additional RAM and start again. If it still doesn't then it's pretty certain to be a hardware problem

If you boot with the Option key held down the OS will show available boot drives.

If the external shows up, and the internal shows but is not bootable, then the system on the internal drive is not recognised. It can sometimes be repaired by using Disk Utility. Alternatively you can install a new system

If the external drive shows up but not the internal then the Directory may be damaged or the disk may be bad. You may be able to fix it with Disk Utility

If Disk Utility can't fix it you can try Disk Warrior but if it's badly damaged you may end up with a bunch of misnamed files and no boot system. Disk Warrior also wants to recover files to a separate drive so, again, an external drive is handy

If it's all gone Pete Tong then the best thing to do is to wipe the drive, install a new system, update it then restore the User you need from the backup. You can do this using Migration Assistant

Migration Assistant allows Users, Applications & System preferences to be copied from other systems. So you can create a new system, copy over your User and Applications and be back close to where you were before

Most problems I've seen in the last few years have been caused by bad hard drives

Nick Froome