The Setup

One Apple MacBook (2,1), projected onto the ground (by accident) 3 times. The case was cracked in a few spots, but all the internal components have resisted the impact with no visible issues. The screen was looking good and so did the hard-disk drive (Seagate, 120Gb).

A couple of months after the last impact the laptop has finally crashed, without any warning. It would not boot into Mac OS X, it just hanged at boot with the spinning cursor on the gray background.

First Aid

Normal boot: does not work, as stated above.

PRAM reset (Cmd+Opt+P+R): does not produce any visible improvement.

Verbose mode (invoked by Cmd+v): the laptop boots in verbose mode, but immediately hangs repeating the same error message over and over:

disk0s2: 0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED).
disk0s2: 0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED).
disk0s2: 0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED).
disk0s2: 0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED).
disk0s2: 0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED).
disk0s2: 0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED).

MacBook hdd failing

It was clear to me that a problem with the hard-disk drive was at the root of all these issues: disk0s2 stands for BSD disk 0, partition 2.

Hard-disk Checking with Disk Utility

There are two simple ways of verifying the hard-disk drive in Mac OS X and both of them use the Disk Utility provided with the operating system:

  • boot with the install disks that came with your MacBook
  • boot in target disk mode (Cmd+T at system startup, after connecting the firewire port to another Mac)

Unfortunately using any of the above mentioned methods did not help, as the disk did not appear in Disk Utility :(.

The Ugly Single-User Mode

With the above methods failing, there are only two ways left to try to recover the data, without specialized help:

  • single-user mode
  • mounting the disk on another system

Fortunately single-user mode (Cmd+S) booted into the faulty MacBook, and I was given a shell :) Hurrah! A quick file listing allowed me to see if files were accessible on the disk, and I could not see any problems at first sight.

Copying files from the failing disk

This task is requires an external hard-drive, so be prepared to have one next to you if you reach this point ever in your life. For me FireWire was not recognized, so I switched to USB. Please note that a HFS-formated disk is recommended, but I think that a FAT drive should also do the trick.

  1. start the MacBook in single user mode: Cmd+S at system boot
  2. mount the root filesystem in Write mode: /sbin/mount -uw /
  3. plug-in the external drive
  4. create a mount point for the external drive: mkdir /Volumes/Rescue
  5. mount the external drive: mount /dev/YourExternalDrive /Volumes/Rescue (in my case /dev/YourExternalDrive was /dev/disk1s1 but this may vary)
  6. copy the data to your external disk: cp -vR /DirectoryToSave /Volumes/Rescue
  7. repeat the above until you save all the required data
  8. unmount the external drive: umount /Volumes/Rescue
  9. shutdown the faulty computer: halt

The Ending

This is a very fortunate case, as all data has been saved from the drive. There was no way to format the drive again, so it had to be replaced. I am not sure if the warranty covers this damage after the MacBook fell on the ground, but if your drive fails without any physical damage, you should definitely take it back to have it repaired under warranty.

A tip to be on the safe side: check the SMART data of your disks regularly (with an utility such as Onyx), check your system logs for errors and backup frequently!