2011 13" MBA has died. Working fine yesterday then went for a reboot which hung indefinitely. Tried safe mode, still hung at startup screen. Tried recovery mode and was able to run disk utility which yielded countless errors and suggested pulling important data off SSD. Unfortunately it couldn't mount the drive to do so. Then I tried to reinstall Lion from within recovery mode but no drive showed up at all. Am I missing any steps to try?

Appointment at Genius Bar scheduled this afternoon (this will be a first for me) what's the likely scenario? They hold it for repair? Replace drive on the spot? Replace entire computer on the spot? It's 7 months old and still under warranty.

what do i get if my guess is correct?

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mattkime
what do i get if my guess is correct?

A fourth cat.

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Bo
2011 13" MBA has died. Working fine yesterday then went for a reboot which hung indefinitely. Tried safe mode, still hung at startup screen. Tried recovery mode and was able to run disk utility which yielded countless errors and suggested pulling important data off SSD. Unfortunately it couldn't mount the drive to do so. Then I tried to reinstall Lion from within recovery mode but no drive showed up at all. Am I missing any steps to try?

Appointment at Genius Bar scheduled this afternoon (this will be a first for me) what's the likely scenario? They hold it for repair? Replace drive on the spot? Replace entire computer on the spot? It's 7 months old and still under warranty.

Sounds like the drive died. SSDs don't usually give any warning at all - they just die.

If you're lucky and they have the drive in stock, they might be able to fix it same day. I've had repairs done in 30min - this is certainly an easy one.

IF they aren't busy, it might be same day. Otherwise they'll get the part shipped overnight and have it done in 2-3 days tops.

Is it a Stock SSD ? If so should be a cake walk. Fixed replaced and wala you are free to post again.

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Fortunately you have a current backup, like everyone else at MRF, so although this is inconvenient it's not a major problem.

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rj
AKA
Vreemac, Moth of the Future

But would AS let you upgrade the drive size for an added cost?

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MartyStickle
But would AS let you upgrade the drive size for an added cost?

No. Corporate policy states they only replace with what it was shipped with. Like for like.

One failure mode of SSDs is that they will read but not write, so the fact that it won't boot may mean something else is wrong...

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What it is, man, a low-down and funky feelin'

Update: Took it to the Genius Bar and told him what I had tried. He said that, given my description he didn't even need to run it through testing. Unfortunately they didn't have a replacement in stock so he ordered one that should be there in a few days. Super nice guy, very helpful. He opened it up and gave me the dead SSD so that I might be able to attempt some recovery.

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rjmacs
Fortunately you have a current backup, like everyone else at MRF, so although this is inconvenient it's not a major problem.

I do in fact have a Time Machine back-up as well as a CCC bootable clone and cloud back-up for the super important stuff. Unfortunately, this is not my MBA...it's my sister's and she has no back-up beyond iCloud for her photo stream and e-mail. She doesn't use this machine much at all and didn't have anything too important except some iPhoto stuff that would be very nice to get back. Now that I have the dead SSD, I need to see about trying some recovery. I'll start a new thread for that.