Question mark folder after reboot and cannot detect other boot option!

Question

My mac froze during some heavy hard disk activity which forces me to power down the machine.

It's a 13 inch MacBook Pro with mountain lion which I bought roughly last year but updated the OS.

But after starting again, all I can see is a folder with a question mark flashing.

I try to reset the nvram but it's the same.

When I click on option button on restart and go into disk utility, I do not see any other disk besides the disk-0 which have 1.39GB space.

Does this means my partition is corrupted or something?

Please advise.

Thanks!

Have you tried inserting mountain lion disk and try to repair disk with disk utility there instead of with a fully booted system?
Yes, the disk filesystem is badly corrupted. MBPs only have one internal disk, so disk0 must be the disk that needs to be repaired. You can repair it from Disk Utility after pressing Option, as you did. If that fails, you can restore a previous backup from Time Machine: restart your Mac and press command+R to enter Recovery mode (support.apple.com/kb/HT4718). Wait until OS X Utilities starts, then select "Restore From Time Machine Backup".

melaos · Answer 1 · 2013-03-28 23:12:16Z

just to update.

the hard disk actually crashed!!!

omg, can't believe that actually happened.

and the guys at the service center told me my data was unrecoverable...

guess i learn my lesson the hard way.

so what i did was after they renew my mac with a new hdd,

i bought myself two external hdd,

one for time machine backup

and one for all my other files,

so i don't keep any master copy of data on my mac hdd anymore.

Don't put all your data on the second external hard drive, unless you plan on backing it up to a third hard drive! The important thing is to have at least two copies of each file on two separate hard drives, not specifically to keep files off of your Mac. If you want an external drive to keep a bunch of files on look for ones that support either RAID 1 or RAID 5.

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