MacBook won't boot up and has a blinking Q in a folder

Well I just had 2 SSDs die on me this morning but I am fastidious in backing up after paying a lot of money for drive recoveries, which is an option if you don't have a backup and have vital data.

You can also do a sector by sector copy to a new drive and then repair. The broken data sectors can sometimes be repaired and your directory may be intact.

Drew,

Very strange to have 2 hard drives die at the same time. Hope they were part of a redundant raid system. Are you sure their dieing does not indicate something else that could be currupted in your system?

Steve

A hammer would fix it

Getting close! LOL

Getting close! LOL

try disk utility a couple of times, sometimes it catches and works, even after a few goes

or if that fails, rebuild your catalog b-tree (say that when your drunk lol)

Hate to sound ignorant but what is a catalog B tree and how do you rebuild it and why?

Steve

Well got it to start in target mode, still can't initialise her drive though. Disk Warrior sees it but cannot mount it or rebuild it.

 

Not looking good,

 

Any other ideas

Reading this thread is like going back in time to 2008. I had nearly the same exact issue and problems with trying to utilize Disk Warrior and other fixes suggested by forums. After quite a bit of fiddling my computer just quit showing the folder with the question mark... and nothing happened besides the fan noise and a black screen when I hit the power button.

Ultimately I ended up consuming mass amounts of vino tinto that night and then I headed to the Apple Store the next day. Blessedly my AppleCare covered a new hard drive for the MacBook. Even more blessedly the Mac Genius who helped me actually got all of my information off of the trashed hard drive before the new one was installed. I had backed everything up redundantly so I was covered anyways, but given your nonbackup status it may be worthwhile to trek it to Apple (if you can).

I'm really sorry to hear about your woes and hope you find a fix!

So I just thought that I would give everyone a final update. The HDD was toast, had to buy a new one and start from scratch. I actually contacted a data recovery company and they said that they can pull the data if needed but it isn't cheap.

Thanks everyone for your help and especially Drew,

Cheers