No longer booting

[Regtom]

I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction. I've been running El Cap for about a month with no issues. In fact, it's been great. I was running a build with Chameleon and sometimes had to boot without caches if it locked up, but Clover has been very consistent. I was using my Hack yesterday and put it to sleep when finished. This afternoon, I tapped the keyboard and was met with a spinning beachball. Minutes passed with no change, so I shut it down to restart. Now it won't boot.

So far, I've attempted to fix this by disconnecting everything but the keyboard and mouse. I've reset the bios settings, testing a few changes to no avail. Mostly the Apple screen pops up, shows the load bar at about 2/3, moves a bit and then reboots. At the moment, I've managed to get to a point where it goes to a "no disk" icon of the circle with a line through it.

Now I'm new to using UEFI and Clover, which I haven't been using until this latest build. I seem to recall on previous BIOS checks that "Clover" was a boot option. At the moment, I get three options for my system drive: Mac OS X, 240 GB drive, and the company who made the drive.

If my memory is good, is the sudden disappearance of the Clover boot option a sign of bad things happening? (Such as the drive failing)

Is there something else I can check? is there a way to boot without cache, providing that might help, without editing files on the drive?

Thanks

 

[P1LGRIM]

Please read and comply with the rules :

Profiles need to contain at least your primary system to assist others with helping you

 

[Regtom]

Profile updated.

Also, I attempted to reply to your post and keep getting a "The requested page could not be found." error.

 

[powerpcg5]

If you have multiple drives, check your bios to see if the correct drive is being booted up first.
Otherwise, it does sound like the disk went bad?

You said "sometimes had to boot without caches if it locked up,"... a computer suddenly locking up for no reason at all, could also point to a failing hard drive.

 

[Regtom]

Thanks for the response, powerpcg5. I suspect you are correct that the disk is failing. I finally pulled it out and connected it to my MBP for some testing. The test failed and the software advised I back up the data, so I'm cloning it to an external drive now. It's a relatively new (maybe 2-2.5 month old) SanDisk SSD and I must have received a bad one. If the clone succeeds, I'll test it further.

I suspect this is why 'Clover' is no longer showing up as a boot option in the BIOS (though really UEFI). Something has failed and the system is no longer accessing it correctly.

As for my old build, if I applied changes, it might refuse to boot using the old caches. I could ignore them and get back to a functional system. Since shifting to UEFI and Clover, I don't know how to do this. But the dying drive might be the fix.

Take care

 

[powerpcg5]

Good thing you caught the problem early and have a chance to clone it. But if the drive gives too many read errors, you may have to just manually copy your important /documents files and reinstall a fresh OSX on the new drive. -- you don't want copying corrupted OSX system or application files into the new drive.

 

[Regtom]

I am back up and running. The SSD passed all tests, but wouldn't boot from my MBP either. In the end, I connected it to the laptop and used the recovery partition to reinstall El Capitan. With that done, it booted perfectly.

I had assumed a need to reinstall Clover and the kext files, but have had no issue. Subsequent tests of the drive, via programs such as DriveDX and SMART Utility provide a perfect rating (the drive is a bit warm while backing up to the cloud and running Time Machine at the same time, but only by a single degree).

I'll update again if anything fails, but it appears life is good again.