Macbook Pro win't boot

NOLACop

Baseband Member
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88
Location
New Orleans
A few days ago my 2011 Macbook Pro would not boot. It worked fine the day before. I have tried recovery mode and diagnostic boot but it will not do anything. It turns on, I see the Apple logo and boot sound. The boot progress bar starts to show progress but either freezes about 3/4 of the way and stops or goes to a white screen. Weird thing is that while attempting to boot numerous times, it did successfully boot up once and worked fine, but that was the one and only time.

I installed Macdrive 10 and put the Macbook HDD in a drive reader. However, Macdrive apparently can't read a Core Volume Mac drive. I was thinking about trying to borrow a mac and attempt target boot mode and see what happens. I really need to get some files and invoices from the computer and I can't find software that will read the core volume mac HDD.

Anyone have any other ideas for me to try? FYI, I upgraded the RAM about a year ago and upgraded the HDD to a 1TB WD drive several months ago.
 
If you're getting the POST chime, then it's probably a bad HDD. They tend to do strange things when they are failing. I would certainly try Target Disk Mode on another Mac to verify.
 
try taking the ram out. put one stick in and see if it powers up, if it does put the other in and should be fine. if it doesn't boot up, and you hear beeps, like a 3 beep sound.. you may have bad ram, you may need to go spend 20 or 30 bucks on some new ram for it... i mean its hardware, sometimes they give up, it is made by human beings ya know. anywho, try switching the ram around and try powering it up again, if that's a no go, then you may have bad ram. if you think the ram isn't the problem, which there's a possibility it isn't the problem, try reinstalling the os. either by internet recovery mode, holding (command option R) right after powering it up, while connected to the internet, preferably with an ethernet cable plugged in, it can work wirelessly too! if you can't get internet recovery mode to work, which its a 2011 so i dont see why it wouldnt... then try reinstalling the os through either a usb flash drive with mac os on it ready to be installed from, or an external hard drive with mac os, orrr a mac install disc if your disc drive works. power it up and hold option... if you have an install disc in, hold option and you can click on the cd after seeing an option for that in the list it will show you after holding option for a little bit. if your trying to reinstall the os from an external drive or usb flash drive, do the same by holding down option until you see the drive your future os install will come from, and boot from that and go through everything until you've reinstalled mac os.
if none of that works, try the ram again.. move each stick around and try powering it up.
i have a 2011 macbook pro, i did the same with mine too, used internet recovery mode and reinstalled lion.. i was even getting the three chime beep too, but it wasn't the ram at all, just corrupted os. i'm almost certain yours would have internet recovery mode too.
go step by step.

peace
 
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