It is inevitable that someday the internal hard drive will develop an anomaly and fail to boot up. This happened to me yesterday. The internal drive on my MacBook Pro is a Solid State Drive - the original from Apple. The first line of defense is to hold down the Command and R keys together when powering up the computer. This boots the computer into the Recovery mode.

Once in Recovery mode, click on Disk Utility in the window that shows up on the display. In Disk Utility, select the internal hard drive in the left column and then click on First Aid in the Tool bar. Then reboot.

Well, this didn’t fix my problem. And if it doesn’t fix yours, then the next step is to re-install the OS. This is done without losing any of your data. And again you have to boot up into the Recovery mode.

After I re-installed the OS, my computer still would not boot up. And if a re-install doesn’t fix your problem, the next step is to wipe the internal hard drive clean and re-install the OS from scratch.

To wipe the computer clean, boot up into the Recovery mode and again select Disk Utility. In Disk Utility, select your internal drive and then click on Erase in the Tool bar. There goes all your data and applications!

After erasing the internal drive, you now select to re-install the OS.

After the OS has been installed you need to reboot your computer. Thankfully, this time my computer did boot up. But now I was faced with a decision. Do I just pretend I have a new computer and start everything from scratch or do I attempt to recover everything from the Time Machine backup that I had been meticulously keeping? I decided to recover from the Time Machine backup. If you have not been keeping an up-to-date Time Machine backup, your only option is to start from scratch. Sorry.

Following the instructions given me on the screen after booting up my computer, I selected to restore from a Time Machine backup. The good news is that the computer was restored and it now reboots normally - and nothing was lost! Even better news is that an annoying problem I had with Mail is now gone.

So now I have to consider that there just might be something lurking in my internal drive that will someday again cause the computer to misbehave. I’m prepared to replace the 500GB SSD with a 1TB SSD should that happen again.

John R Carter Sr