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I updated a few things on my laptop then turned it off one day. I tried turning it on today but it does not fully turn on. When I press the power button I hear the chime and I see the loading Apple symbol but after a few minutes of the loading bar not moving (it comes up half way loaded) my laptop shuts off. Please does anyone know what’s wrong and/or how to fix it
This doesn’t sound good here ;-{ From what you are describing either the HD died or the SATA cable has failed. Hopefully you have a good backup of your system. Do you have access to a second Mac? If you do you could try starting up your system in Target Mode and using a FireWire cable connected to the other system access your systems HD so you can run Disk Utility on it to test it out. For now don’t do the repair only do the verify and then let us know what you discover. The other option here is if you have an external drive which is setup as a bootable drive to start system using it and then running Disk Utility from it. Lastly, if none of these are workable and you have the newer EFI Firmware on your system you could get a new HD for your system and swap out your old drive and then connected to the Internet and do an Internet recovery so your new drive is setup. Then use a SATA to USB adapter like this one: StarTech USB 3.0 to 2.5” SATA III Hard Drive Adapter so you can try to recover your files from the old drive. Here’s the IFIXIT guide for replacing the HD: MacBook Pro 13" Unibody Early 2011 Hard Drive Replacement I would recommend replacing the SATA cable at the same time just to be sure. Here’s the IFIXIT guide for that: MacBook Pro 13" Unibody Early 2011 Hard Drive Cable Replacement. Lastly I would use this cable: MacBook Pro 13" Unibody (Mid 2012) Hard Drive Cable - Apple P/N# 923-0104 as its better than the original cable.
