Chosen Solution
This macbook has old family photos and an old version of Quicken on it. I was not turning it off because I was afraid of not being able to get it on again. It was really hanging up so I foolishly restarted it and now I can’t get it up and running. It will turn on and “chime”, go to gray screen with apple logo and progress bar. Progress bar will start, go only for a half an inch and then bar will start over, go to half an inch of progress again and then laptop shuts off. I really need to get this working so I can at least access these things (photos and quicken info) before retiring it. Please advise! Update (05/22/2022) I have tried booting in Target Disk Mode. I have another MacBook Core Duo (same kind of laptop as the one I am having trouble with). This one starts up ok. I was able to boot the bad laptop in Target Mode and the firewire icon was on the screen. The two laptops were connected by the Firewire but when starting up the good laptop, I could not see the other one in Finder. External drives were allowed(to be visible). I tried multiple times and used 2 different firewire to firewire cables but could still not see it. I tried the “bootable volume” scenario (Startup Manager). Again I could not see the bad laptop’s internal drive. I have an iMac that I normally use. It’s a late 2015 3.1 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5. If I get a thunderbolt to firewire adapter do you think I can try the target Disk mode from Macbook (Core Duo 2) to the iMac? I’m desperate at this point. Just can’t figure out why the target disk mode is not allowing it to show up.
Not good your drive has failed ;-{ At this point things get tricky! You’ll need to get a data recovery app which you’ll run from the good system via Target Disk Mode to try recovering your data files from your bad system which I would try first. You could try using Apples disk Utility Disk First Aid, I often find I have to run it a few times. I’ll warn you theres a good possibility you won’t be able to as it sounds like the boot sectors are messed up. Shipping your drive out to a data recovery service might be the only option but they are expensive and likewise can’t always recover things either. Sorry for the bad news
