I have a crashed macbook air (aluminum unibody). When I try to turn it on, it will either wont come on, or it will come on but stay at the startup screen with the apple sign. How much would it cost to fix it and also, can i fix it myself?
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I am willing to bet your MB Air hardware is not broken. There are a half dozen possible reasons why it might hang at startup as described in the first link below. Try these things in this order:
Disconnect everything except the power cord and restart. If that has no bearing, read on.
Restart holding the Shift key for at least 30 seconds (past where the spinning gear icon appears). If that enables a complete startup, see the second link below to understand "Safe Boot". Some of the processes that occur during Safe Boot can fix certain problems, so restart again after Safe Boot (don’t try to open a lot of applications since some won’t run in Safe Boot) but in the normal way without holding Shift.
If the first Safe Boot attempt got it to startup fully, but the restart without Safe Boot still hangs, do Safe Boot again and troubleshoot your user account Login Items (third link below).
On the other hand, if holding Shift did not make it startup fully, boot to the OS install disc, go past the language screen, and open Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. Select the hard drive, select the "First Aid" tab, and choose to repair the hard drive (NOT repair permissions). If it shows "No repairs were necessary", quit Disk Utility, and go forward to choose "Options", and then "Archive and install", but put a check for "Preserve Users and network settings".
On the other hand, if any problem is found by Disk Utility, repair again. If it did find problems, and the second repair attempt still finds problems, you must either buy some stronger disk repair software or quit Disk Utility, go forward with the installation, choose "Options" and choose "Erase and install". With that option, all your data will be lost.
If it won’t let you get to the remote disk drive options then you probably can’t fix it because you have no disk drive to put the os x cd into. Whatever it costs to fix will be less than the laptop cost so you may as well take it to the store. If its a hardware fault it should be covered if you have the warranty and some software is.