My MacBook Pro crashed as I was backing up using Carbon Copy Cloner. Now it won't boot up past the Apple screen. I already tried PRAM reset. Help!
We all know that sink feeling one gets in the pit of their guts when their computer fails to work as expected. Unfortunately, without having your MacBook Pro in the same room, it's difficult for us to figure out exactly what it is that's keeping it from starting up. That said, we can tell you some things to try. Let's start with Disk Utility.
Disk Utility has saved many an Apple user's bacon over the years. Every Mac OS X installation DVD has Disk Utility, and it resides in your Mac's Utilities folder as well. Since your Mac crashed while Carbon Copy Cloner was reading your startup drive, you might have a hard drive issue.
Start by launching Disk Utility from the Utilities folder on your Mac, selecting your Macintosh HD in the source list on the left, and clicking the Verify Disk Permissions button. Should anything sinister turn up, click the Repair Disk Permissions button and Disk Utility will do its darnedest to sort the problem out. Once that's done, click Verify Disk. Should it find any errors, you'll notice the Repair Disk button is grayed out. That's because Disk Utility can only fix your startup drive if you're booted from a disc or some other bootable volume.
So next, look around for either a retail copy of Mac OS X or the installation DVD that came with your MacBook Pro. Insert it in your Mac's optical drive, and restart holding down the C key to force the MacBook Pro to boot from the DVD. It'll take a while, but when it's booted, click Utilities in the menu bar and select Disk Utility. Now you can run Repair Disk on your startup volume.
While it's working, go make a sandwich or read a chapter of your favorite book, as the program will take some time to do its thing. if all goes well, the issued with your drive will have been uncovered and repaired. If things go badly, however, Disk Utility may advise you that your laptop's hard drive needs to be formatted so that the operating system and all of its contents can be reinstalled. This is a worst-case scenario, and of course it'll erase everything, so you might want to use Disk Utility to copy your hard drive's contents to an external first so you have a backup of all your data.
If Disk Utility was able to repair your Hard Drive, rejoice! Shut down your computer and start up normally. If you're able to start your system up, you're golden. If however, your MacBook Pro still refuses to boot into OS X, you might want to consider making a Genius Bar appointment or trying a more robust (and expensive) hard-drive utility like Data Rescue 3 or Alsoft's excellent DiskWarrior. Good luck!
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