MBP unable to start up

[epos]

Stuck at gray loading(?) screen with spinning wheel. user reported laggy response a few days ago. suspect HDD is dying.

Had tried the following way to fix:

Command +S for Single user mode, stuck after nearly a whole screen of text, no keyboard input accepted. thus no way to test/repair disk.

Option Key and Command +R for Recovery, stuck at gray screen.

Zap the NVRAM with Command + Option + P + R, no luck.

Intel-based Macs: Resetting the System Management Controller (SMC), no help either.

dug up an old Macbook and use its HDD to boot MBP, succeeded. so all other hardwares are proven to be working perfectly. almost confirm it is HDD or file system corrupted.

question 1: how do I recover the data from the problematic hdd? with USB cable to the a HDD dock, I can access the HDD but it seems I can't see everything as only about hundreds files are shown, the HDD info shown ~260GB are used. is Mac employing some security/encryption to prevent the HDD from external access? I haven't try repairing the HDD from old Macbook cause worry it might wipe out the data.

question 2: If all else fail, I will probably wipe the hdd clean and reinstall. problem: the Lion base MBP doesn't comes with recovery DVD, the recovery partition is build into the hdd. kind of dumb idea IMO, if the issue can be fix by the above steps, the recovery HD is most likely not needed; if can't be fix like my case, the whole HDD is gone, how am I gonna access the recovery HD to recover? that aside, Apple do not allow the download of stand alone recovery image, and OS X Recovery Disk Assistant v1.0 required the present of Recovery HD, also, it demand 10.7 Lion...sorry, my question is actually how to reinstall the OS without destroying the existing data like the recovery mode offer?

Lastly, Apple warranty in Singapore is usually how many years? this MBP was someone else, she can't even remember when she bought it. I believe this was 2011 model.

 

[PetPet]

Standard AppleCare is 1 Year.
If she purchased AppleCare, it'll be 3 years in total (including the first year)

I daresay the hard disk is faulty. Look up the serial of her Macbook here and verify if it's still under warranty. https://selfsolve.apple.com/agreementWarrantyDynamic.do

If AppleCare is valid, bring it down to one of the service centres in Singapore. Preferably e-Serv.

If AppleCare has expired. I would recommend that you have the hard drive replaced. But before doing so, I would recommend you to download a copy of OS X from the App Store and use Lion DiskMaker to produce a boot disk for you to install OS X on to the new hard drive.

The boot disk can be anything, a portable HDD or even a thumb drive. It does not have to be a DVD/CD.

 

[epos]

500+ bad sectors, hdd gone case liao. MacDrive Pro reported no error! but attempting to copy the data in Windows always fail.

Will try again in old MacBook, hopefully I'm able to recover the data.

 

[PetPet]

If the data is valuable you should disconnect the disk and not attempt to do anything. Bring it down to those data recovery services.

 

[epos]

Standard AppleCare is 1 Year.
If she purchased AppleCare, it'll be 3 years in total (including the first year)

I daresay the hard disk is faulty. Look up the serial of her Macbook here and verify if it's still under warranty. https://selfsolve.apple.com/agreementWarrantyDynamic.do

If AppleCare is valid, bring it down to one of the service centres in Singapore. Preferably e-Serv.

If AppleCare has expired. I would recommend that you have the hard drive replaced. But before doing so, I would recommend you to download a copy of OS X from the App Store and use Lion DiskMaker to produce a boot disk for you to install OS X on to the new hard drive.

The boot can be anything, a portable HDD or even a thumb drive. It does not have to be a DVD/CD.

Thanks for the reply.

unfortunately, the warranty had been expired.

Any idea why the MacDrive Pro unable to copy the data to Windows? because the MacBook had only a tiny 60GB, the MBP had about 250GB of data. using my USB2 hdd will probably take forever. because there are bad sectors, copy process may be interrupted, user input is required thru out the process...

the data not really essential, I just hope they can be recovered.

 

[PetPet]

Thanks for the reply.

unfortunately, the warranty had been expired.

Any idea why the MacDrive Pro unable to copy the data to Windows? because the MacBook had only a tiny 60GB, the MBP had about 250GB of data. using my USB2 hdd will probably take forever. because there are bad sectors, copy process may be interrupted, user input is required thru out the process...

the data not really essential, I just hope they can be recovered.

Try using a Terminal command instead?

cp -r [source folder] [destination directory]/[foldername]/

 

[epos]

Try using a Terminal command instead?

cp -r [source folder] [destination directory]/[foldername]/

will do, thanks again.