Mac Book Pro won't boot

[ratled]

2011 Macbook pro - Just using it to surf the net and it just up and shut down and wanted to reboot for no reason. When it went to reboot it started just fine then goes to a gray screen with a circle and slash through it. No matter how many times we try and reboot it, plugged in or not, it just keeps doing this.

Any thoughts what it is or the fix before I take it in?

TIA

ratled

[Euphoria526]

Is the battery dead? As in try keeping it plugged in and booting it up. A lot of times we miss the simplist solutions

[ColdDeadHands1]

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5099286?tstart=0

Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.

[ratled]

Thanks CDH, I think is it. The down side is we don't have a recovery disk.
Now to solve that issue

ratled

[Casual_Shooter]

Try starting it up while holding down the Command, Option, P and R keys.

Wait for it to chime three times and then let go.

[Rivers]

2011 Macbook pro - Just using it to surf the net and it just up and shut down and wanted to reboot for no reason. When it went to reboot it started just fine then goes to a gray screen with a circle and slash through it. No matter how many times we try and reboot it, plugged in or not, it just keeps doing this.

Any thoughts what it is or the fix before I take it in?

TIA

ratled

It REALLY helps to know some more details about your Mac, like which version of OS X is installed. I think it started with 10.7 that Apple included a hidden recovery partition. This allowed booting and repair of the regular partition using utilities on the recovery partition.

You typically access this when you boot your Mac, and press and hold the ⌘ (Command) and R keys immediately after the initial chime sounds a few seconds after the machine is turned on. You must keep holding down both the Command and R keys until you see a window with “OS X Utilities” across the top in large text. Be careful because you can actually delete your user files and seriously mess things up. I hope you've been using Time Machine or another program to regularly back up your laptop...

From your description, it could be a hard drive failure too. If it won't boot to the recovery drive, that's a likely culprit. If you do need to replace the hard drive, consider installing a SSD for a huge performance boost. The 2011 MBP is easy to take apart and replace the drive, unlike the latest Mac laptops which are soldered into place.

If you have questions, PM me. I'm an Apple Certified Technical Consultant, a long title for passing some butt-kicker exams.

[the86d]

Pitch it.
Nobody need all the Apple-negativity in their life.

Then replace it with 2-3 new PCs for the price of a new Mac, but you COULD learn some Linux... and wouldn't have to run iTunes, OR could run a variety of OSs on the PC natively.

[solipsism]

Pitch it.
Nobody need all the Apple-negativity in their life.

Then replace it with 2-3 new PCs for the price of a new Mac, but you COULD learn some Linux... and wouldn't have to run iTunes, OR could run a variety of OSs on the PC natively.

OS X is built on Unix. It's Darwin BSD with a fancy GUI. So you can learn *nix using a Mac as well.

[the86d]

OS X is built on Unix. It's Darwin BSD with a fancy GUI. So you can learn *nix using a Mac as well.

"In other words, while Apple’s marketing team loves to play the Unix card at every turn, its developers explicitly made a distinction between the OS X’s kernel and a true Unix kernel."

https://danielmiessler.com/blog/the-truth-about-os-xs-kernel-its-not-unix/#gs.gk8fdXI

GNU is a wonderful acronym.

Requiring an overpriced hardware/software combo to learn something is silly, when there are better, free alternatives.

[ocabj]

"In other words, while Apple’s marketing team loves to play the Unix card at every turn, its developers explicitly made a distinction between the OS X’s kernel and a true Unix kernel."

https://danielmiessler.com/blog/the-truth-about-os-xs-kernel-its-not-unix/#gs.gk8fdXI

GNU is a wonderful acronym.

Requiring an overpriced hardware/software combo to learn something is silly, when there are better, free alternatives.

I still think Aqua is still the best window manager for a *nix operating system. This is why OS X is the best balance for people who do everything from coding to sysadmin to devops to infosec to office productivity to media production.

I honestly thought about going back to a multiple environment setup, Linux for work and Windows for media publishing, but I would end up spending more money that just going with the Apple solution.

But I will admit that 4K video processing is the outlier, and I may have to just build a machine specifically to handle 4K. But we had onsite training for AWS and I'm actually looking into utilizing AWS to process 4K video in the cloud.