osx not booting up and I'm unable to make it to an apple store...

December 25, 2007 10:18 PM

osx not booting up and I'm unable to make it to an apple store...

my intel mac book pro running osx 10.4.10 suddenly stopped booting up yesterday while on a very long flight without any kind of entertainment. now I'm sitting in germany without an apple store or anything else open for a couple more days. just my luck.

all I get is the grey screen with the apple logo and the spinning circle thingie. after a while the whole thing stops and the computer switches itself off. I zapped the PRAM, I tried booting in safe mode but nothing helped. disk utility can't repair the hard drive. (I have a boot disk with me.) I don't have a small enough screwdriver here to rip out the RAM in case it's one of my sticks gone bad and I haven't been able to find much else I could try right now in the apple support pages.

thus I come to you... any ideas? anything I could try?

posted by krautland to computers & internet (20 comments total)

Reboot the machine in verbose mode (hold Command+v down right after the startup chime). This will show you what's going on under the hood (the "hood" being the grey screen) when you boot up your Mac.

Pay special attention to the last few lines of scrolling text that appear before the computer shuts itself off, then report back here if you see anything that looks vaguely like an error message.
posted by melorama at 10:52 PM on December 25, 2007

IOBluethoothHCIController: start idle timer stopped
long pause, then
invalid sybling link
(...)
checking catalog file
long pause, then
volume check failed.
(...)
soon after
synching disks ... killing all processes
cpu halted ...

and then it shuts down.
posted by krautland at 11:03 PM on December 25, 2007

If you have access to another Mac and a FireWire cable, you can try to bring your MacBook Pro up in Target Disk Mode and at least copy important files over to the other Mac (and from there to a CD, USB drive, etc).

Basically, Target Disk Mode lets a working computer treat your non-booting computer as an external hard drive. It may not work if the hard drive itself (or the disk controller) has gone bad, though.
posted by jedicus at 11:03 PM on December 25, 2007

missing line: volume check failed.
posted by krautland at 11:05 PM on December 25, 2007

I used target disk mode once but I don't have anything but someone else's windows pc I'm hijacking here. damn.
posted by krautland at 11:06 PM on December 25, 2007

for the record: target disk mode does boot up and the firewire icon appears. this at least gives me some hope the hdd isn't fried.
posted by krautland at 11:08 PM on December 25, 2007

Here are a couple of discussion forum threads that may be of some help.

This one suggests a few simple commands you can try to repair the file system.

This one suggests that faulty or improperly installed RAM might be to blame, which is easy to check.

Also, it sounds like a Windows PC can see the Mac in Target Disk Mode. The problem is that you will need a third party utility to actually read the disk. This AskMefi question addresses that issue.
posted by jedicus at 11:14 PM on December 25, 2007

I had a similar problem with my MBP about three months ago - it was bad RAM, but my local Apple store wanted to replace the motherboard at first (agh). I'd try checking that out before doing anything else - also, can you run the Apple Hardware Diagnostic? Might offer some clues...

And for reading MacOS volumes on a windows box, I'd suggest using HFSExplorer. Did wonders for me.
posted by roygbv at 11:59 PM on December 25, 2007

I used target disk mode once but I don't have anything but someone else's windows pc I'm hijacking here. damn.

Not to dampen your spirits, but that doesn't really mean anything. Targeted disk mode will share any internal drive, including your DVD/CD-ROM (it's actually the easiest way to get a DVD drive on the PPC Xserves). So getting the icon doesn't do you any good; you'll have to actually try to mount it on another machine.

Could be a disk failure... the "volume check failed" message is suspicious. And yet obvious part of the OS is still there, or it wouldn't be able to load the IOKit plugins at all, or run the disk check. Hopefully other files are salvageable too.
posted by sbutler at 12:48 AM on December 26, 2007

I tried to locate a fitting cable but the pc doesn't have firewire and allI have is those cables, so making a connection there is out as well. seems like I will just have to hope that some store is open and able to help tomorrow.
posted by krautland at 1:21 AM on December 26, 2007

I had a problem very similar to this a few weeks ago where an external firewire drive refused to mount after a long post plug-in delay. Disk Utility was unable to fix the volume. Once I looked at the system logs, it was apparent that the HFS+ catalog file had somehow been corrupted. I fixed the volume by manually running "fsck_hfs -r" on the file system in order to rebuild the catalog file. If the boot disk you have allows you to open a terminal window or allows you to boot up in single user mode, you could try running fsck_hfs from the boot media. I just checked my bash history and it looks like my complete command line was: "fsck_hfs -r /dev/disk3s3". In your case, the specific device in question is probably more like /dev/disk0s3. One thing to note: this command will only work if there's enough contiguous free space on the volume for a new catalog file. I'm not sure what will happen if it fails. I suspect Very Bad Things.
posted by strangecargo at 1:49 AM on December 26, 2007

strangecargo: I am tempted to give this a try but wonder how much free disk space I would need. if this is a matter of a couple GB, then I could do this. I have yet to run out of disk space. I just don't know if I have more than 5GB available right now.
posted by krautland at 2:13 AM on December 26, 2007

I'm not sure exactly how much space the catalog file takes up. I don't think it's all that big. The table in this hfs-user post suggests that it's on the order of tens (or maybe low hundreds) of MB, depending on the size of your volume and how many files it contains. If you want to be really paranoid about your data, you could find a machine to mount your MBP in firewire target mode, make a bit-for-bit copy of the block device and *then* try to run fsck_hfs as described above. When I ran into this problem, I was a little bit more cavalier because my primary usage of the drive in question is to store SuperDuper backups of my PowerBook, so I wasn't too concerned about losing data.
posted by strangecargo at 2:47 AM on December 26, 2007

I've had this problem and no amount of troubleshooting worked. Applejack came very close, but it still required a new hard drive in the end.
posted by senseigmg at 6:51 AM on December 26, 2007

sensei: did you lose your data?
posted by krautland at 7:18 AM on December 26, 2007

Have you tried starting up in single user mode? Hold down command-s immediately after powering on and wait for white text on black to star appearing, then release the keys. Once you see the command prompt (#), type "/sbin/fsck -fy" to run a filesystem check. It will tell you if it repairs something or fails to repair something.
posted by pmbuko at 2:00 PM on December 26, 2007

pmbuko: OS X is automatically running the equivalent of that command (and failing) every time it boots because the filesystem isn't clean. If you look at the verbose boot output that krautland posted, the part right before shutdown is fsck_hfs output. I really do think that this is the same invalid sibling link/corrupt catalog file problem that I had myself, but the solution to that problem involves running fsck_hfs with the slightly dangerous "-r" argument.
posted by strangecargo at 2:43 PM on December 26, 2007

I ran it like pmbuko recommended since it seemed less risky and strangecargo turned out right: the volume check failed because of an invalid sybling link. there was another line below that reading (4, 15568)

I'm trying to locate an apple dealer in this town right now to see if he can rip out the ram just to check and to see if he has disk warrior, otherwise I'll run fsck with -r later today and hope for the best...
posted by krautland at 12:57 AM on December 27, 2007

post scriptum: the store ran disk warrior over it and got it fixed. permissions, as diagnosed in this thread. they think it won't be a problem again but I'm backing everything up and when I have a weekend or so, I'll reinstall the whole system.

thanks, everyone!
posted by krautland at 2:49 PM on December 28, 2007

I did lose my data, but I had made a backup about a week before. ALWAYS BACKUP!
posted by senseigmg at 7:09 PM on January 21, 2008