Ableton Forum

White screen....flashing picture of a file folder with a question mark in it.

Does that mean death?

Sounds like a dead hard drive.

Bad juju...

Deffo no way of restoring it?

try mounting your laptop as a firewire drive off another machine. It may be that the drive is only partially corrupted, and the part being your OS folder.

you may yet be able to salvage your work.

Pre-OSX I used to often have to plonk a new system folder back on people's laptops after they had 'tidied' all their extensions into the bin. I doubt that OSX is so amenable about such simple OS swapping though it's worth a try.

please note that all my mac fixing knowledge ends at about OS9 !
So I'm probably horribly out of date with any advice

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edit,
still seems viable

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1661

If the above fails, try mounting/repairing it with http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/index.html

+1 for diskwarrior.
i've looked after more than 60 macs over the last 20 years and have only lost one hard drive. and that was in a fairly well travelled plastic macbook which had been routinely bashed in various aircraft holds. the only other hardware problem was a faulty graphics card on an imac a few months ago.

i've been able to fix everything else with either disk utility or diskwarrior.
i hope you get it fixed...

i am sorry for your potential loss.... good luck and god speed

Sorry for your hassle. Another vote for trying to mount your laptop as a firewire drive off another machine.... This has saved me on a few occasions.
keep us informed of the outcome.

Another vote for Disk Warrior. You'll be booting from th edisc or installing it on your backup clone and running it from there. Is your machine drive making clicking noises etc? If so it's probably mechanical = nt good prognosis but if not then chances arer it's just a corrupt directory. DW is the BEST tool to repair this bar none. Apple's built-in Disk Utility is feeble compared to the DW routines. Keep DW installed on your main machine so it gets backed up to any clone you (should) make, you can then boot from this clone now and again and point Disk Warrior at your main machine. Maintenance and clones are your friends, drives are cheap as chips.
Hope you get fixed up

It's clicking like a muthafunker...

I have tried Disk Utility but it doesn't even recognise the hard drive as existing in the machine...I guess, if I am at that point disk warrior won't work either...

Fortunately I store very little on the machine. s'all on an external drive.

Soooooooo, it really means a new purchase I guess.

Maybe sell a guitar to finance the purchase. The question is now what to get, thinking iMac and going fully desktop rather than another macbook or pro.

I get little done mobile nowadays and me live days are over for a while anyway so, I'm thinking desktop is the way to go, could be loving that larger screen real estate.

UKRuss wrote:It's clicking like a muthafunker...

sounds like a mechanical head problem. put your hd in a plastic bag and after that in a freezer. let your hd in the freezer for 12-15 hours. then install the drive, mount it again, hurry up and try to backup your important data.

I wouldn't even know how to get the HD out...

what is the exact model of your macbook? look in the interwebz, there´s lot of information of how to change the hd on macbooks.

In any case, you certainly don't need to buy a new computer. All it needs is a new internal HD, which can be had for $50 for a 160GB, and you can replace it yourself.

$50 and a couple hours and you're right as rain. Minus data.




Edit: on second thought, your macbook is totally dead. worthless hunk of plastic. i'll take it off your hands and dispose of it properly

Ooooooo.I like that!