My 2011 MacBook just slid off the table and hit the floor face down opened. There was a message saying to reset and I did. After that it wouldn't load OS X Lion; it stays at the gray screen forever. Going into single user mode and running fsck -fy returns a lot of disk i/o errors. After several hours, it's still displaying those and some other messages. Can fsck still fix this drive? Mu windows partition is working.

  • Your disk is probably damaged physically, which fsck can't fix. Hate to say it, but you'll probably need a new disk. – Nathan Greenstein Jan 5 '12 at 0:57
  • SMART says the Hard Disk is fine and Apple Hardware Utility says there are no hard ware issues so I'm going to try a format and then fsck after.... Good thing I've got backups. – kzap Jan 5 '12 at 13:50

Sounds like your harddisk is busted. There is a feature in MacBooks which is there to help protect the disk by parking the head in the event of a fall but it's not foolproof. Even if you managed to resolve the errors, I wouldn't trust that the disk had not been damaged and you just risk further data loss in future. Best thing you can do is backup anything you can salvage if you don't already have a backup while the disk can still operate and either have Apple or an authorized repair centre replace the harddisk. You can also replace the disk yourself if you feel capable. There are instructions in the manual and also on the Apple support pages. You haven't said which model of 2011 MacBook you have but here are the instructions for the 13-inch (page 37)


  • thanks will try my best to salvage the data and replace the disk... sigh – kzap Jan 5 '12 at 2:41

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