I got the worst result possible from this test: the drive worked fine. I opened my desktop gaming computer, and plugged my laptop hard disk in there. I have a lot of respect for the engineers who designed a system that, even after 5 years of hard abuse, still retained it’s “new motherboard smell.” I optimistically tried re-seating the SATA cable for my drive, but wasn’t surprised when that didn’t work. I opened up my mac to look for signs of burnout or other damage. When I got home, I pulled out my toolkit. A motherboard failure, though - I tried not to think of it. All my work is backed up and relatively accessible, after all I could stare digital death in the eye with only a hundred-Euro bill for a new drive. There’s something zen in that moment, when you find yourself hoping that you’ve only lost your entire hard drive. Maybe it just skipped the drive diagnostic because no devices reported back, I hoped. Not just no hard drive diagnostic, but completely no page for SATA diagnostics at all.Īt this point it was clear that a catastrophic hard disk failure was my best-case scenario. The diagnostic report looked fine, everything in tip-top shape! That is, until I went to the hard drive diagnostic page - there wasn’t one.

I had never had the chance to try it out before, but that didn’t give much satisfaction as I grimly waited for it to work it’s magic. A lesser-known feature of the Apple boot manager, is that if it doesn’t have a device to boot from, it can download an image from the Internet, load it into RAM, and boot from there. So I started into Apple’s built in Diagnostic Test mode by holding “D”. This immediately threw the issue out of the realm of “something I messed up myself”, and into the less-entertaining realm of “hardware failure.”Īt home I have some tools for diagnosing this sort of issue, but in the airport I had limited options - and unlimited time.

I hadn’t done anything in particular with Grub recently, but I had done some kernel updates, and you never know… But the recovery boot just got me a circle with a line through it, the universal “no” sign. This is not the first time I’ve seen this - I’ve played with my boot options enough to mess this up for myself a few times! I breathed a heavy sigh and tried starting onto the recovery partition by holding “Command+R”. Generally this icon means that EFI couldn’t find a valid startup device.

Just an unhopeful file folder with a question mark. I tried starting into Startup Manager by holding the “Option” key. So when I started it up at JFK airport this week and got a gray screen of death, I was a little concerned. It’s my roving office as I travel the world to conferences, performances, and job sites. I have a 2012 Macbook Pro - yes, that coveted “last good model” - and it runs Ubuntu Linux. In the airport last week, my laptop stopped booting.

Macbook startup question mark