Case Study — MacBook
One failed drive. Three days to find every fault.
A 2011 MacBook came in stuck on the Apple logo. The hard drive was failing — but fixing that only uncovered a second, unrelated fault stopping it booting.
The case
A hard drive fault that turned out to be two faults.
A 2011 MacBook arrived unable to get past the Apple logo — and the obvious cause wasn't the only one.
The MacBook's internal hard drive had started throwing errors, a pattern we see often on machines of this generation. What made this one harder was a second, unrelated issue that turns up regularly on the same model: a worn internal hard drive cable, which had let the drive's corruption run further than a straightforward fault normally would.
Before anything else, the drive was cloned sector by sector with a hardware-based imaging tool. Every recovery step that followed happened on that image — the original, failing drive was never worked on directly.
What we did
Five attempts to find what was really wrong.
- 01
Image, then assess
The clone showed only a couple of bad sectors, but the file system itself was damaged. DiskWarrior rebuilt most of the structure — yet the MacBook still wouldn't boot, now failing with kernel errors instead.
- 02
Rule out the drive entirely
An OS X recovery pass made no difference. To remove the ageing, cable-troubled hard drive from the equation, we fitted a solid state drive and installed OS X Mavericks fresh. It booted cleanly.
- 03
Watch the fault come back
The moment Apple's Migration Assistant carried the user's data and apps across, the same boot failure returned. A test install of OS X Lion, migrating the same data, worked fine — narrowing the cause to something inside the user account itself.
- 04
Confirm it across four OS versions
The same account was carried forward through Mavericks, then Sierra and El Capitan. Each OS installed without issue; each one failed on boot the moment that user account was reinstated.
- 05
Rebuild around the corrupted account
With the drive and the OS both cleared of blame, a fresh OS X install went onto the formatted disk — this time using Migration Assistant to bring across only the apps and preferences, not the account itself. It booted. Documents and pictures were then copied in by hand.
The outcome
Back to a working Mac, with no backup to fall back on.
There was no Time Machine backup for this MacBook, so nothing about the fix was a simple restore — every stage relied on the drive image and on isolating the fault by hand, one OS install at a time.
The process ran three days from start to finish. The total cost came to around £450 including VAT, covering the SSD upgrade alongside the recovery work itself.
The MacBook went back running OS X Mavericks, on a new SSD, with every application working and the client's documents and photos restored into a freshly built account.
Not every boot failure is the drive. Get it imaged and diagnosed properly before another reinstall costs you more time.