Question Crashed MacBook Pro - Help!!!!!

james_19742000

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Afternoon all,

In the old days I used to be very happy and comfortable messing around with Windows based computers years ago, taking the apart, reinstalling software etc etc but now a bit latte n life I want out of the box solutions, I don't have time to 'get things to work' etc if you know what I mean!

Anyway a couple of years ago as I had an iPhone, iPad etc I decided a MacBook Pro was the next stage, so I bought one I think the model is MD101/BA it's the basic model, i5, 4gb, 500g hd etc and it's been fine once I got used to it, it's not used for loads, mainly browsing, iTunes, mail, documents etc but I like how it just works, that was until I around 2 months ago, all of a sudden it crashed with the rainbow coloured spinning ball, so I restarted it and was greeted with the grey screen and question mark flashing, on some internet research it appears that basically my hard drive has crashed, so I put it to one side and have just gone without, but I need to sort it really, I thought I would try the apple support call line and to be fair the guy was very helpful and couldn't get it to do anything, so he seemed to think that the hard drive is knackered and it needs replacing. fRom what I have read that seems the main course of action to repair it.

However if I ordered a replacement hard drive, how do I get it to work again? When I was doing some messing with it why it first failed I got to the OS X utilities screen and clicked on reinstall, it said it can't do it as the system is running Yosemite but as the computer came with mountain lion it couldn't reinstall with a newer OS, I have a feeling that my hard drive has crashed and the data has been lost, so if that is the case, if I put a new hard drive in, how would I get the computer to work again? Like I said back in the day I didn't mind messing around with Windows stuff as you had back up discs should things go wrong, but with this MacBook I have nothing at all, so what can I do to get me MacBook back up and running please????

Please bear in mind that this MacBook is effectively dead in the water and I can't get anything from it though.

Thanks in advance.
 
Hey James,

Ok so a dead hard drive is the most likely culprit. You should be able to power on and keep the "D" key held down to get into the Apple Hardware Diagnostic screen. You can then run the tests and see what it reports back.

Assuming it is just the hard drive your best solution is to replace the hard disk drive (HDD) with a solid state drive (SSD). These give a great performance boost and it's a highly recommended upgrade. Ideally these days you want 4-8GB of ram as well. If you have less than 4GB again it's an inexpensive upgrade do change the ram yourself. Crucial and Kingston do Mac compatible memory kits.

To reinstall OS X Yosemite 10.10, the version you last had (though El Capitan 10.11 is now the latest OS X version) you will need to either boot from Mountain Lion recovery disc and upgrade from there via the Mac App Store or get someone to make you a USB key with the OS X version you want.

I assume you haven't made a Time Machine backup to restore your files and settings? If that's the case once you have a new drive in and OS X installed it will be like starting with a new machine from scratch.

Run the diagnostic and see what it says and report back on the thread. Let us know your current ram capacity too. Also if you can put the machines model and emc number up (printed on the bottom of the Macbook) for us as well then we can see what your best options for memory upgrades are.

If time's an issue for troubleshooting and getting it working their are plenty of companies and people that can sort it all for you, that includes myself. So give me a pm if you want to go that route.
 
Brilliant, many thanks for your reply, that's a huge help.

I done the hardware test thing last night and it came back with 'Alert! An error has been detected' followed by a long code, but doesn't state any specific issue.

When I go back to the utilities menu and look,at the hard disk it only shows just over 1g of capacity even grouch its a 500g drive in there.

I have a genius appointment on Tuesday so will see what they can offer, if they won't play ball then I will get a new SSD and some extra ram and upgrade it, a plea on Facebook last night revealed a friend who will do a boot key for me, so hopefully we are getting there!

Just a bit annoyed as all my other apple products have always been trouble free but he one item I was hoping would be trouble free has turned into a bit of a nightmare, and this time I will be setting up a time machine back up with my external drive!!!!

What upgrades would you recommend for it? I was thinking a 250g SSD and 8g of RAM? That sound about right?

tHanks for pointing me in the right direction, much appreciate it and giving me the confidence to get it repaired myself.
 
If you need to replace the HDD then get an SSD of a capacity that suits your needs. 250GB-1TB depending on your needs and budget. 8GB of ram sounds fine. What do you have currently?

You say the HDD is currently showing up as only 1GB rather than 500GB? Or is it saying only 1GB of space left?
 
Strangely it's showing as slightly total capacity and free space as just over 1gb, it's almost as though the other 499 have disappeared! This is what's so strange, I was just on the net when it originally happened, happily surfing, beach ball, so restarted and it had all gone! Just hoping there's a way of possibly recovering what was on the disk?
 
Sorry, it's currently 4g of ram
 
Why not put a pic up of how the disk looks as I can't work out what you're trying to say there.

Can you boot into Recovery mode, hold CMD and R down together from power on. Then launch Disk Utility and try First Aid. If the disk is greyed out you need to select unlock from the top menu in disk utility and enter your password when prompted.

Disk Utility (El Capitan): Repair a disk
 

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