Mac OS·785 discussions

Confused SSD won’t boot

Tags: Apple

Looking for a definitive answer to the following problem:
2006 iMac running 10.7.5 with 4 megs ram and 250 SSD
Upon reboot the system refused to come back up and gave what appeared to be faulty video. Since I already had one video card failure, I replaced the video card and rebooted.
System starts to boot and stops at the white screen with the Apple logo and the spinning vertical wheel lines. Will not pass that step.
Rebooted and went into Recovery mode. Ran simple repair options on the SSD with no results. I have the option to Restore via (old) backup on local Airport. Since I don’t really want to lose everything I used Disk Warrior and was able to easily gain access to the SSD. I then downloaded pretty much everything off the SSD so that I at least could retrieve documents I needed.
However, still cannot boot the SSD. From the various methods I have tried I feel confident that the MBR has been corrupted. I have expert experience with Windoze operating systems and have always been able to re-write the MBR to get an MS drive to boot. Especially if the data was not corrupted, as is the case with my SSD.
My question:
How do I re-write the MBR to get the SSD to boot? Or is there another method for gaining access without having to lose the data by re-installing the OS?

Topic

Since you have backups of your stuff.

In reply to Confused SSD won’t boot

My answer is the same as https://www.techrepublic.com/forums/discussions/need-to-delete-system-files-on-macbook/

That is, time for a clean install. At the office and shop we don’t touch the owner’s drive most of the time. For most models we slip in a blank drive, do a fast clean install and see if the machine is good or bad.

Confused SSD won’t boot

In reply to Since you have backups of your stuff.

Thank you.
Actually I am looking for an expert solution from someone who knows the code well enough to tell me whether or not the MBR can be re-written.
I am fully aware that I can at any time do a clean install.
I appreciate your reply.

As to that.

In reply to Confused SSD won’t boot

https://www.google.com/search?&q=10.7.5+repair+osx+site%3Adiscussions.apple.com finds a lot of priors and as you can read there, all appear to well, you know what.

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/85121/resetting-mbr-on-imac and other discussions repeat how OSX uses a GUID and not MBR for booting. I won’t retrace that ground here.

[Author]

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