So your Mac isn't booting. You're seeing an endless grey screen, or an Apple logo that won't go away. What next? Some problems can be fixed by Disk Utility, and some cannot. Whatever it is, you will probably need to try to boot from some other drive if your Mac won't start. And how do you do that? Well, it depends on how new your Mac is. The process is quite different for the newest Macs and you'll need a fresh approach. Read on.
Lion, on a new Mac
Lucky you, there might be a recovery partition on your hard drive. This is a secret part of your hard drive that lets you re-download Lion when all else fails, and which you'll have to hold down a key during booting to access. Why not just a disc? Some of the newest Macs, the fresh Mac mini and MacBook Air, don't come with a disc, or an optical drive to put it in — and they've got to provide something in case of emergency. Some slightly less recent Macs also scored this option due to a recent firmware update — check in Software Update for an "EFI update" to see if you're one of the lucky ones.So, if your relatively new Mac's hard drive fails and is truly broken, you can boot from the internet and download a fresh copy of Lion. Nice, if your internet connection can handle it. To access it, reboot, and while booting hold command-R. You might be able to restart, run disk utility and fix your problems. Of course, if the drive is too far gone, this may not be an option.
Older Macs
Your Mac probably came with a boot disc, a DVD that you can pop in your computer, hold down C, and use to start it up. Once you're in, you can repair your hard drive (if you're lucky) or erase and reinstall (if you're not).If you have to install fresh, this may be an older version of the OS, which means you're up for a further reinstall after the first one, but at least you won't have to watch it proceed or type any serial numbers. Get it started and walk away.
Make your own Lion boot disc
If your Lion Mac does have a DVD drive, it's sensible to have an easy way to recover from drive failure and go straight back to the latest release. But Lion is a download-only OS, right?When you download Lion, you actually download a disc image that you can use to create an install DVD. You'll need to poke about inside the Lion installer application, but it's not hard at all. Right-click the "Install Mac OS X Lion" package, then dig into Contents > SharedSupport > for InstallESD.dmg disk image.
Right-click that, then choose open in > Disk Utility. When it opens, find that image in the left-hand sidebar and choose Burn. Pop in a disc when prompted and wait.
To use it, pop the disc in your drive, and hold C while you boot.
Use a separate hard drive
If you have a full bootable backup, or a second drive you've already installed Mac OS X on, you can boot from that. Plug it in, hold option as you boot, and use the arrow keys and return to choose the disk and start up. Now, with luck you can use Disk Utility to fix your problems.Use another Mac
If you have another Mac around, you might be able to use it to boot from. If you can mount an install disc on that Mac, you can connect your problem Mac and then mount it in target disk mode, which means it pretends to be a hard drive itself. Connect the problem Mac (that you would like to treat as a drive) to the host Mac, with a FireWire cable if possible. Hold T on the problem Mac, and if you're in luck it will show up on your host Mac. Use Disk Utility if you can.The Lion USB key
Internet not good enough? No optical drive, no spare Mac to boot from? Apple will now sell you a Lion USB key you can boot from. Nice, if pricey.Recovering
You've booted, somehow. So, how do you get your files back? First, repair your hard drive with Disk Utility. Hopefully you'll be lucky and this will work; otherwise, you'll have to buy a new drive. If you're really lucky, you'll be able to boot straight away, with minimal data loss, but if not, you'll probably have to erase and reinstall. This shouldn't be too painful.If you have a Time Machine backup, and you should, then you'll be prompted for it during the reinstall process. This is an awesome way to get back to where you started. If, instead, you have used Carbon Copy Cloner or something similar, you will follow a different process.
No backup? Well, hopefully that's a lesson learned. Losing your files is something that should only happen once at most. Buy a cheap external drive, plug it in, reformat to HFS+ (Journaled) if needed, say "Yes, I'd like to use this for my Time Machine backup" when asked, and never worry again. All hard drives die; your data shouldn't.
And what if the drive has died? Warranty or AppleCare a a good option if you have it, otherwise you could swap the drive for something new, like an SSD. This is a doddle in a Mac Pro, not too hard in a MacBook or MacBook Pro, tricky in a Mac mini and very hard in an iMac.
One last thing: not every problem is drive related. Many Macs come with hardware test discs that can help pinpoint the problem, or you can just call Apple for help. But finally, the worst case: if your motherboard has issues and your Mac is out of warranty, it's likely to be cheaper and faster to just buy a new Mac. At least it will be faster, right?
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