I was given a 2006 model MacBook Pro to look at the other night, seems it turns on ok, but it won’t boot into the OS X, all it does is show a flashing Folder Icon with a Question mark.

I’d come across this problem once before on another Mac and it usually relates to an issue where the Mac can’t find/locate the OS X System software, this can generally be resolved by the methods/steps listed below

If any step resolves the issue, you don’t need to continue to the next one.

1. Select your Mac OS X startup disk with Startup Manager by restarting and holding the Option key. After your Mac starts up, restart again to verify that the flashing question mark does not appear.
2. If the issue persists, insert your Mac OS X installation disc. Be sure to either use the disc that came with your Mac, or, if you installed a later Mac OS X version from disc, use the newer disc.MacBook Air note: On a MacBook Air, there are two options for starting up from Mac OS X media: Either connect a MacBook Air SuperDrive to  the MacBook Air via the  USB port and restart the computer, holding down the C key during  startup, or use Remote Install Mac OS X to startup from a system  software  DVD that’s located on a partner computer. Once started up from Mac OS X media, skip to step 3.
3. Restart the computer, then hold the C key during startup.
4. From the Utilities menu, choose Disk Utility. Don’t click Continue.
5. Select your Mac OS X disk (named “Macintosh HD” by default) in the left side of the Disk Utility window.
6. Click the First Aid tab.
7. Click Repair Disk to verify and repair any issues with your Mac OS X startup disk.
8. After repairing the disk, try to start up normally.
   Important: If Disk Utility finds issues it cannot repair, you may need to back up as much of your data as possible (or use Time Machine to back up to a different disk), then erase the disk and reinstall Mac OS X. You should back up important files and data before erasing a drive. Erasing deletes everything on the hard disk (including things on your desktop). Also, you can install Mac OS X onto an external disk, start from the external disk, and use Migration Assistant to transfer items from your usual internal Mac OS X startup disk to the external disk, then erase the internal disk and reinstall Mac OS X.
9. If the issue persists, and Disk Utility didn’t find any irreparable issues, quit Disk Utility, quit the Installer, select your disk when prompted, and restart.
10. If the issue continues, reset PRAM. Note: After resetting PRAM, if the computer starts up normally, reselect the startup disk in the  Startup Disk preferences.
11. If none of these steps resolve the issue, start up from the Mac OS X Installation disc and reinstall Mac OS X. (Be aware this could wipe all your data stored on the startup disc)

Well I tried all of these and it appeared that none of them worked, would have even tried the final choice which was to re-install the Mac OS X, but alas the MacBook Pro’s owner had photo’s/files on there he didn’t want to lose and asked if there was anyway I could recover them.

Before I could attempt to recover the photo’s/files I first needed to see if I could get access  to the drive from another Mac, this involved taking the MacBook Pro apart in order to access the hard drive itself, now I’ve done this with previous MacBooks and it was fairly easy, it was just a case of taking the battery out and a few screws out of an access panel and the hard drive was slipped in behind it, however with this particular MacBook Pro the hard drives not as easy to access.

Luckily however I use a very handy website called ifixit.com which is loaded with tutorials on how to repair upgrade various pieces of hardware from iphones, to cameras, to toasters to cars, and even luckier for me there was a tutorial on upgrading the hard drive in a 2006 MacBook Pro Core Duo model (find it here ).

Took about 15-20 minutes to get all the tools togeather and I had access to the hard-drive, which I then placed in a 2.5 external caddy and attached to my iMac via USB, where the iMac could see it, but couldn’t access any of the data on it, came up with various messages about the hard drive couldn’t be read/verified etc

Now what to do next . . some people might give up at this point and say tough luck and just put a new hard drive in the MacBook Pro and reload OS X

Well not me . . .  first thing I did was run a little piece of software I have called Data Rescue 3 on the hard drive, first scan was just a basic quick scan, which didn’t find any data on the drive, so next ran a deep scan of the drive, which after about 5 mins came back with a message informing me that the it was taking to long to read some of the sectors on the drive, which indicated that the drive might fail if I continued the Deep Scan, options available to me then were :

1. Carry on regardless and hope the Deep Scan didn’t result in causing a Hard Drive failure (though even if it succeeded, there was always the possibility that when I came to actually copy any data off the hard drive that had been found by the deep scan, the drive might fail, resulting in no data retrieval being available)

2. Clone the failing hard drive to a new hard drive, thus reducing any chances of the drive failing during a deep scan and then allowing retrieval of any data found on it

Not wanting to lose any of the data before I’d had chance to retrieve it, I went for option 2 : Clone the hard drive, luckily Data Rescue 3 comes with some cloning software as part of it package, so after attaching a secondary drive to my iMac and setting it as the clone location, I left Data Rescue 3 to do its job, expecting it to be completed after a few hours, how wrong I was, 52hrs later the drive had completed 98.2% of the cloning process and couldn’t clone the remaining .8% of the drive.

Well 98.2% isn’t all the drive, but its a lot more than I expected with the drive at the point of failure at any moment, so I detached the old hard-drive  and set about the deep scan of the 198.2gig that had now been cloned, after about 4-5hrs it had finished and had managed to find near enough all the data that MacBook Pro owner required saving, which I’ve now placed on a spare external drive ready for the re-install of the OS X on the MacBook Pro.

I can honestly say I’m very impressed with Data Rescue 3, this is the 1st time I’ve used it on a failing hard-drive to recover data, mainly used it before just to recover deleted files and to clone hard-drives, but this is definitely one for the Mac/PC repair person’s recovery arsenal, nothing like going in to battle prepared.

Now the only thing left for me to do its pick up some Mac OS X 10.4 install discs from a Geordie Brian and I can re-install the OS X on the MacBook Pro, copy the recovered files back onto it and make someone a very happy person when I hand it back to them all nice and clean and repaired.

I do like it when a repair comes together . .

Oh and for future reference if you ever need a MacBook/ MacBook Pro repairing I price the work reasonably 🙂