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Question

fix macbook air grey screen, no disc drive

Jan 1, 2015 8:31PM PST

My friends macbook air was working fine. It began to slow down on startup and reset the date and time. It was really slow opening finder windows especially, and just generally clicking on anything brought on the spinning wheel. After a little while it just wouldn't start up and went to a blue screen. After a little while longer it would only chime then go to the grey apply logo with spinning wheel underneath.

I've tried resetting pram and the other thing, and tried safe boot. The details I get with safe boot end in 'waiting for dsmos' (i think). I have no disc drive for the install discs. I have what is meant to be a bootable USB but the Mac doesn't recognise it when I try the other boot options. I have an external hard drive, if I put a .DMG of snow leapord (which I believe the macbook air to be running) on the HDD would this help me? I qm only semi Mac savvy but willing to try anything with a bit of instruction so any help is most welcome. Any more information needed I will find if I can! Thanks in advance!

Discussion is locked

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Answer
Grey screen
Jan 9, 2015 2:19AM PST
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MacBook Air doesn't have optical drive
Jan 27, 2015 4:30AM PST

vembutech was kind to give the link, but the person making the query said that his/her friend's computer was a MacBook Air, which has no internal optical drive, so startup from the Install disk isn't possible unless the writer has a separate drive. And there also was a reference to a bootable USB drive (presumably, something like the flash drive that holds the newest version of Alsoft's Disk Warrior, number 5).

I'm concerned, myself, that the drive couldn't boot the Mac, because I just bought a copy of the new Disk Warrior for my daughter and son-in-law, who, like the friend of scoopoobilus, have MacBook Airs . A tech person at Alsoft told me that not only would the original drive be able to boot up the computer, but that a copy also would work. (For some reason the new DW works only through certain earlier versions of OS X, but the owner can update it with some additional software that is provided. The tech person suggested doing that on a separate flash drive and keeping the original as is was advisable, in case something went wrong.) I hope I haven't wasted my money. I also was thinking of getting DW 5 for myself.

Sorry to be a wet blanket, and maybe the bootable drive mentioned just wasn't the right one, but if one flash drive doesn't work, would any other one do?

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You've opened the door to something few discuss.
Jan 27, 2015 4:35AM PST

If folk want to DIY repairs, wouldn't they get USB memory sticks for such tools and something 30 or less buck USB DVDRW?

I know folk that just park their stuff on clouds, sticks and let apple fix it.
Bob