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anonymouse1 wrote:
I'd connect the drives that won't work to the MBP, and run Disk Utility/Drive Genius/Etc. on them FROM THE MBP. They don't need to be mounted for that.
Did that, now cloning to a fresh disk just in case I wipe and restore. I also used BatchMod to unlock the locked volumes. The contents of one unlocked volume are now showing up and appear to be intact. The main backup drive attached to the Mac Pro has also been unlocked. No contents were showing in the backups folder; but running Data Rescue, even though it didn't copy anything, has caused the disk images to reappear.
An external drive that was connected but not turned on when whatever this is happened appears to be OK and has booted the Mac Pro. Next step, I guess, might be using CCC to restore the last backup to one of the affected drives, to see if it then can boot.
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a shot in the dark here, but is it even remotely possible there is a version of OS X ransomware out there, and they didn't get it quite right, thus it prevent you from booting from actual drives (with data), but they didn't screw up recovery partitions yet?
On the other hand you should be able to boot from DVD. But also NSA seems to be able to hack firmware of hard drives these days, so I guess hackers messing with someones firmware is not sci-fi anymore, is it?
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I was feeling almost that paranoid. But no one is asking for ransom, yet.
This is a new one for me. Really odd, as all disks have checked out OK with Disk Utility and DIsk Warrior so far. And yet rendered unbootable somehow.
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have you downloaded or updated any app recently?
are you usually running logged in as Admin, or from a simple user account?
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A few updates through the App,Store, nothing else that I can recall, except possible a ChronoSync update a few days ago. After this started, I got BatChmod.
I was booted from an old Snow Leopard system on an external drive, to check its Xprotect status. At some point, the weird error messages about kexts started, one after another. I had to shut off to get out of that; it seemed to be throwing up the error for every kext. After that, restarting became impossible except via a recovery partition, and every connected drive had problems. By 2 AM, I had gotten access to the drives that were locked and throwing up the permissions error, and had restored my internal Snow Leopard drive. I am hopeful that my main Mavs boot drive is also going to work. I cloned my backup to it late last night and also cloned a backup of the internal Yosemite drive. Have a headache from being in front of the computer from about 10 AM yesterday to 2 AM today, and need to take a break from the whole mess. I have too much work over the holiday weekend to start anything time-consuming.
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It's getting to the same point in the boot process and failing on both internal and external boot systems, indicating some kind polling problem - something's not answering correctly. But that could be a software issue (broken file) or a hardware issue (something like an add-on card or even a bad stick of RAM). It's hard to tell.
Age is a factor, so if you haven't already done so, check your RAM by pulling/replacing one stick at a time.
Sometimes a dying (but not yet dead) drive will cause this problem at start up too…
These've all been mentioned, but they seem like the most likely culprits.
Good luck.
