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I have a 2010 Macbook Pro running the latest version of El Capitan. I recently did an update and ever since then when I boot up I get a prohibitory symbol. I tried reinstalling El Capitan using a USB drive, but once it reboots it tries to go through the installation process again. When I take the USB stick out it gives me the prohibitory symbol. I tried to restore to a time machine backup from a time capsule using two different dates. The first restore attempt was to a date when I first installed El Capitan. That resulted in it saying there was already a corrupted version of the OS and it couldn't restore. So I formatted the hard drive and tried again, it resulted in a prohibitory symbol. The second restore attempt was to a date right before I installed El Capitan and was on I think Mountain Lion. That resulted in a file showing a question mark in the middle. What should I try next?

Edit: I installed an SSD in this two months ago and the S.M.A.R.T. settings are fine.

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    It sounds like a hard drive failure, which would not be linked to the El Capitan upgrade but just a coincidence of timing. – Mike Scott Apr 20 '16 at 17:09
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    @MikeScott That sounds right. Brent, can you take the hard drive out of the MacBook (see iFixit for guides), mount it on another Mac, and check the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive? – RedEagle2000 Apr 20 '16 at 17:32
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    @RedEagle2000 He shouldn't even have to mount it to another Mac, or really any computer. Since he has that USB drive, he could just use Disk Utility after booting off of it to check. – JMY1000 Apr 20 '16 at 19:14
  • @JMY1000 Does the El Capitan Installer have Recovery stuff like that, though? I can't really remember, but I thought it didn't. – RedEagle2000 Apr 20 '16 at 19:17
  • @RedEagle2000 It should under the Utilities – JMY1000 Apr 21 '16 at 5:39
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It was a bad sata cable according to the genius bar. They switched it out and it now works!

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