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Blinking grey folder question mark of death

silverpig

silverpig

Lifer
Fack. My MBP started to stutter while playing a video so I rebooted it and now it won't boot again. I have a vertex2 in as a hard drive. Safe boot failed, resetting the pram didn't help either.

My 4 gb USB key isn't big enough to get a restore image onto, so I have to go get a bigger one tomorrow. I hope it is a simple repairing permissions issue.
 
Usually when you see the Folder/Question Mark combo, it is a failing/failed hard drive. You have a backup of all your information, right?
 
Adramalech said:
Usually when you see the Folder/Question Mark combo, it is a failing/failed hard drive. You have a backup of all your information, right?
Click to expand...

Yeah I know. It could be just a permissions issue though from what I read too.

The hard drive is under warranty, and the important stuff is backed up so I should be fine.

One thing is I turned drive encryption on in Lion because I heard it was much improved but that the old versions of encryption in OSX were finnicky and were prone to stuff like this.
 
I went and got an 8 GB key this morning and made a bootable USB drive from it. I put it in my MBP, then hold option on boot. The computer sees the drive, I click on it to boot from it, and then I get the spinning wheel and a circle with a line through it and it hangs there.

FML.
 
Eug said:
If you have access to another Mac with the Lion recovery partition on it, you can can make a bootable recovery flash drive. You just need 1 GB.

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1433
Click to expand...

Okay. Gonna try this using my wife's macbook.

I just tried booting her computer off the lion usb stick I created and it didn't work either. Must have been an error when I made it.

Alright, so I made the recovery USB stick and it booted from it, but I am stuck at the language selection screen. The trackpad is unresponsive, and so is the keyboard. My bluetooth magic mouse moves the cursor around, but I can't click on anything so the screen is just stuck there.

Trying to re-make the lion install disk... FML this is more work than a mackintosh.


update: So it turns out the screen was just really slow. The trackpad became active after a few minutes of sitting there, and then it advanced me to the next screen. Checked disk utility, my SSD doesn't show up at all. Guess it's time to pull it and RMA.
 
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I doubt that a permission fix is going to solve this just due to the symptoms you are having. Did you have an Apple Store close by? They usually have all of the Operating Systems on disc or can sled your hard drive to another Mac to see if the data is still accessible.
 
I dunno, these Sandforce chipset drives really scare me. And the OCZ warranty practices scare me even more.

And yeah, if you have a slow USB flash drive, booting from one can take forever. It's not so bad with a 1 GB recovery disk, but don't try to install an entire OS image on it. I did that with a 16 GB "ultra-fast" flash drive (Patriot Rage XT Quad Channel), and even then Snow Leopard still took forever to boot.
 
Adramalech said:
I doubt that a permission fix is going to solve this just due to the symptoms you are having. Did you have an Apple Store close by? They usually have all of the Operating Systems on disc or can sled your hard drive to another Mac to see if the data is still accessible.
Click to expand...
Just stick the drive into a $10 USB enclosure to see if it can be seen. If not on a Mac, then try a PC.
 
Yeah I've pulled the drive and tried it in a USB enclosure and it doesn't even register. It's not even like the drive is detected at all. I might as well be attaching a brick via spaghetti.

I've started the RMA process so we'll see how it goes. I don't have the original packaging or the 3.5" mounting bracket that came with it because they are in boxes across the country as I am moving. I hope they don't get snarky about it.
 
Adramalech said:
I wish you the best of luck. Was it the original hard drive or a third party hard drive in there?
Click to expand...

Third party. The system is a 2009 13" MBP. The first thing I did with it after I turned it on to make sure it worked was to pull the spindle drive and install an OCZ Summit in it. That drive worked fine but I ended up moving it over to my desktop hackintosh in February and bought an OCZ Vertex 2 to put in the laptop. It is the vertex 2 which has just crapped out.

My wife just picked up a 320 GB spindle drive for me as a temporary drive as I can't be without my laptop for the next few weeks. I don't have my usb backup drive with me as that is in storage, but at least all my contacts/documents/settings/whatever were stored via mobileme/idisk.
 
AFAIK, Apple doesn't use any Sandforce SSDs. No OCZ drives either. They're either custom form factor drives (without any housing) with custom Apple firmwares (eg. from Samsung), or else they're standard drives from top tier companies with custom Apple firmwares and label branding (eg. from Toshiba).
 
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Yep 100% the drive's fault for sure now. I just got a 250 GB WD Scorpio Blue to use in the interim and the system is back up and running.
 
Good to hear you have it back up and running. I just purchased a OWC SSD after reading about the plethora of issues that the OCZ drives have. Are they going to RMA the drive for you?
 
Adramalech said:
Good to hear you have it back up and running. I just purchased a OWC SSD after reading about the plethora of issues that the OCZ drives have. Are they going to RMA the drive for you?
Click to expand...

Yep I just got the RMA number today so I'll ship it out. They have to test it before I find out if I get a replacement or not.

I tell you, I sure do notice the boot up and opening of programs to be a lot slower with this spindle drive though.
 
Eug said:
Some of the OWC SSDs use Sandforce chipsets, just like OCZ.
Click to expand...

It's funny because my old OCZ Summit has been pretty great. It was one of the earliest SSDs to come out and has the old Samsung chipset in it. The 4KB random speed is slow compared to any other SSD, but it still blows away any spindle drive. When I moved it to my desktop, it replaced a 74 GB raptor as my OS drive and the difference was huge. It was previously in my laptop and I can say that I didn't really notice the "upgrade" from the Summit to the Vertex 2. Sure, it benchmarked higher, but opening safari in 0.9 seconds vs 1.1 isn't a big deal.
 
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