My Mac crashed, unable to fully boot up. I need my data from it...

originally posted by: Flyingclaydisk
a reply to: JamesChessman

Well, likely not a physical power button issue because the unit sounds like it does try to boot, so you can eliminate that. However, unmounting the disc in the middle of a boot procedure could damage the boot sector track. In fact, that's fairly common actually. If the read head is actually in the process of reading or moving it can either impact the track, or erase/alter the track memory at that location. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about the way Mac partitions and/or formats an HDD. With a Win machine this could be corrected with a repair disc because the way read/write works it wouldn't attempt to re-write the boot data to a bad track and would remap the disc accordingly. I can only presume it's similar with a Mac, but I'm not positive.

In any case, regardless of OS type, the first thing I'd be looking to determine would be:
1. Is this a data corruption issue, or a hardware issue? A disc scan would tell you this, but you can't boot it up to do this, hence the repair disc noted above.
2. If it was a data corruption issue I'd focus on fixing that. If it was a hardware issue I'd be looking to replace the HDD, because it's only going to crop up again, even if it could be fixed initially. Storage media is cheap in comparison to data, at least that's how my brain works prioritizing things.

Sorry, I'm not more help.

Thank you again.


Re: the broken boot up:

The thing is that it just seems very obvious I broke the boot up process myself with my power button abuse.

Idk if it suggests only software broken, and/ OR if it implies broken hardware too, but either way, it seems clear that it was my power button abuse that broke the boot-up process and its related software and/ or hardware.

And I still feel settled on obtaining a thumb drive with the required software for macOS to repair itself and/or reinstall itself.

I don’t have a disc drive for my Mac but in the past, I’ve messed around with windows computers’ OS being reinstalled etc. so I know it’s not complicated to reinstall an os, in general...

...


And if there’s a legit hardware problem, and that’s established as the real problem, then I’d probably go ahead and rip open the Mac and just take out the hdd (which has important things on it that I need to preserve).

Anyways thanks again!