Mac laptop startup failure

carlazai · 19 Sep 2011 at 20:39

Hi,

My friend has a mac air laptop that ran out of battery and so didn't close down properly. Now when the laptop starts the screen is blank except for a question mark cursor and is stalled. I looked up entering safe mode by holding down shift but even that doesnt seem to work. Any ideas on how to get it to boot properly?

Deleted member 77746 · 19 Sep 2011 at 20:45

I had this on 3 brand new iMacs / 50 iMacs that were delivered.

Power on, then hold down Alt then select your hard drive.

Vince · 19 Sep 2011 at 20:46

Sounds like the HDD has failed. Had to fix a 13.3 with exactly the same issue a few weeks ago. You can try booting from the osx disk and doing a repair on the drive which might work but worst case is a new hdd and a reinstall.

edit: The one I had unfortunatly wouldn't recognise the drive was in there.

carlazai · 19 Sep 2011 at 21:15

Ok we tried the Alt trick and it was looking for the wireless network in the area and going mad. So instead did a reformat and all seems ok. Thanks for the help people, always appreciated .