Macbook won't boot, white screen. Bricked

An EFI boot manager utility

Status: Beta

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Macbook won't boot, white screen. Bricked

Forum: General Discussion

Creator: alberto

Created: 2014-11-14

Updated: 2014-11-16

alberto - 2014-11-14

Hi everyone

I believe I screwed up really badly, so if someone can give some advice It would be greatly appreciated.

I wanted to have dual book on my macbook, so after searching for a bit, I found a couple of sites that offered a step by step explanation on how to do it using rEFInd.

I successfully installed it, so I got the rEFInd startup screen and everthing, the problem is that when I selected the usb drive I wanted to install from, It always got stuck on a black screen saying "No bootable device -- insert boot disk and press any key"

But that's a different problem. After not being successful in booting from the usb, I had a "brilliant" idea. I could take the same image I flashed into the usb and try to do the same but on the partition I had prepared for linux, so then maybe rEFInd will be able to boot if it's on the hard drive. so I did

sudo dd if=/path/to/downloaded.img of=/dev/rdiskN bs=1m

diskN being the partition on the hard drive, then restarted, and after that, the macbook never came back. Startup key combinations don't work, so using the recovery partition is not an option. It only turns on, makes the chime sound and get's stuck on a white or grayish screen.

Any advice or Ideas on what could have happened?

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Anonymous - 2014-11-14

Hi,

Does your macbook have an optical drive? And you tried to boot from a Mac Os X DVD without success too?

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alberto - 2014-11-15

Hi Marc
Thanks for your reply. It does have an optical drive, I haven't tried to boot Mac OS from a dvd, because I don't have one. The laptop didn't come with one, but with a recovery partition and as I said, I cannot boot from that with cmd + R.

I've just tried booting from a Linux CD I had to dismiss that possibility and as I thought It doesn't boot from the optical drive even when pressing C on startup.

If IT helps to understand my problem, it seems the laptop gets stuck before even powering the keyboard, as now I cannot eject the linux cd pressing the EJECT button

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Anonymous - 2014-11-15

OK so there is nothing the machine can boot from... do you have access to another mac? If you boot yours in target mode (press T when starting up), it should be mounted as an external drive and you should be able to reinstall the OS?

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alberto - 2014-11-15

Thanks again Marc. Yes luckily I have another macbook from work. Could you please elaborate a bit more? How should I connect the dead HD to the working macbook? Could I use USB enclosure for that?

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joevt - 2014-11-15

Target Disk Mode requires connecting the Macs with a FireWire cable or a Thunderbolt cable.

If Target Disk Mode doesn't work, then you can try taking the drive out of your MacBook and putting it in an external drive enclosure.

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alberto - 2014-11-16

Thanks everyone for your suggestions.
In case it helps someone, in the end I got a USB enclosure, formatted the "linux" partition, uninstalled rEFInd
sudo rm -r /EFI/refind
and everything came back to normal.

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