Sunday__ wrote:
My MacBook Pro (mid-2010) is stuck on the Apple logo with a loading bar. It never reaches the login screen or recovery utilities. I’ve tried booting into Safe Mode and Single-User Mode. In Single-User Mode, the root filesystem is read-only and mounting it as read/write fails.
Just running a file system check & remounting the read-only volume as read+write should not fail. If it does, then it indicates the Hard Drive is most likely bad.
I get errors related to launchd and "Process 1 exec of /sbin/launchd failed, errno 2". I suspect missing or corrupted system files.
If First Aid does not show any errors, then a failing Hard Drive is most likely the cause of those corrupt files.
I created a bootable USB using Windows, but I'm not sure if it's properly formatted.
The only reliable method of creating a bootable macOS USB stick is by using another working Mac that is compatible with High Sierra. Generally a model from Late-2009 to 2018 can be used....you can confirm if a particular model is compatible with High Sierra by using the information in the following article:
https://eshop.macsales.com/guides/Mac_OS_X_Compatibility
FYI, that other Mac can currently be running any version of macOS.
Here is the Apple article with actual instructions for creating a bootable macOS USB installer:
Create a bootable installer for macOS - Apple Support
You can also try booting the laptop into Internet Recovery Mode using Command + Option + R to attempt to access the online macOS High Sierra installer. Unfortunately some Macs may only boot to the online installer for the version of macOS that originally shipped with the Mac.
How can I recover access or reinstall macOS?
You can boot to a macOS installer (USB or online) to try to scan & repair the file system using Disk Utility First Aid. If that fails, then you can try reinstalling macOS over top of itself, or by performing a clean install by first erasing the whole drive (Intel Macs only). You can also try installing macOS to an external USB3 drive to see if the iMac can boot a full copy of macOS from an external drive. If installing & booting macOS from an external drive works, but not installing & booting macOS from the internal drive, then you have most likely confirmed a bad internal Hard Drive.
How to reinstall macOS - Apple Support
If your Mac doesn't start up all the way - Apple Support
If you don't have a backup of your data, then that is bad. It means your options are much more limited since it means macOS 13.x High Sierra is your only option for a macOS installer if you need to access the data on the internal drive. You can try putting this broken iMac into Target Disk Mode & connect it to another Mac running macOS 10.13+ to attempt to access the data.
I'm assuming you have macOS 10.13 installed and it is using the APFS file system. If this broken iMac is instead using the MacOS Extended file system, then you also have the option of using a macOS 10.11 El Capitan installer. An El Capitan USB installer can be created using a Mac model generally from 2007 to 2015....use the link provided earlier to confirm compatibility of the other Mac.
However, if the Hard Drive is failing as I suspect, then anything you try to do is most likely making the drive failure worse since macOS & most consumer level apps & utilities are unable to handle all of the errors produced by a failing Hard Drive. Usually you have just one chance at recovering data from a failing Hard Drive, so you must choose wisely on how you proceed....I highly recommend confirming the health of the Hard Drive and if found to be failing to contact a professional data recovery service.
You can try running the Apple Diagnostic to see if any hardware issues are detected, unfortunately the diagnostics rarely detect issues even when a hardware issue is confirmed through other methods...if the diagnostic reports a problem, then there is a hardware issue. A much more reliable method for confirming Hard Drive health is by creating & using a bootable Knoppix Linux USB stick as outlined my post here:
Creating & using a Knoppix bootable USB stick to check health of Hard Drive -- HWTech - Apple Community
In the future make sure you always have frequent & regular backups of your computer and all external media (including the cloud) which contains important & unique data.
