Chosen Solution

Hello My 15" Macbook Pro (mid 2009 2.53 Ghz) is not booting up properly (it displays the apple logo and the progress wheel). Even safe boot is not always possible. In verbose mode I got the message “disk02: no such media present.” I downloaded a program called S.M.A.R.T. Reporter to do a health check on my HD. Everything seems fine. I was told that the problem is then probably the system bus. Does this mean that I have to replace the logic board altogether?

It it were me, I’d start up from my system installation disk and use Disk Utilities to reformat the drive (using the write zeros option). The write zeros will map out any bad blocks so that they will not be used. Now try installing a new system.

If the problem is actually the system bus, yes, you would need to replace the logic board. I’d actually try out a utility called DiskWarrior and see what it reports on your hard drive. It’s possible that your system is just corrupted. Have you tried booting from another instance of the Mac operating system? I like to keep an external boot drive around for troubleshooting instances like that. Boot off of the external drive, run DiskWarrior and let it try to repair your OS. If that doesn’t work, you could try re-installing the OS over top of your data (so you don’t lose anything). Then see if it will boot consistently for you. Don’t do anything without a backup of your data. Seriously. Let me know if any of that helps.

Buy a new HD. But in the meantime, try using Single User Mode to have the computer check and repair disk corruption. To get into Single User, at the boot sound, hold “cmd” and “s” down until the screen goes black. When you get to the prompt and white text has stopped scrolling by, type this (without the quotes): “/sbin/fsck -fy” This will run a check disk very similar to Disk Utility but will be more thorough. That may allow you to use the computer enough for you to get your data off of the HD. At this point, getting your information off the HD should be your first goal. Sounds like your harddrive has one foot in the grave. Tonka

I’ll second that drive failure. Usually if I buy a Mac from ebay I’ll buy a new drive ahead of time.