My Mac boots to a bricked ( x ) icon, how to fix it?

My late 2010 MacBook Air can't boot up correctly. A couple months ago, I was exploring Disk Utility, and I think I did something I shouldn’t have done. I forgot what it was but it has something to do with partitions. When I try to boot my Mac now, it just shows the bricked icon (x icon). I’ve tried opening Disk Utility, Recovery Mode, nothing works. Any help is appreciated.

Best Answered by

Jenny Zeng

Answered on Wednesday, May 31, 2023

If your Mac is stuck at the x icon and won't boot up, it likely doesn't have a working operating system. To fix it, you need to reinstall macOS. Here are three ways to do it:

Reinstall macOS from Local Recovery Mode
Reinstall macOS from Internet Recovery Mode
Reinstall macOS from an external bootable drive

If your Mac is running Mac OS X 10.7 or later, you can use any of them to reinstall a working operating system. Otherwise, your Mac may not have Recovery Mode and you can only reinstall macOS from a bootable drive.

Before reinstalling macOS, you should get the important files off your Mac first. You can use Target Disk Mode if you have another Mac or use iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac in Recovery Mode. After your data is safe, try the following steps to fix the bricked Mac.

① Reinstall macOS from Local or Internet Recovery Mode

Shut down your Mac.
Press the power button, then immediately press and hold Command + R to start your Mac form the recovery partition.
Release the keys when seeing the Apple logo.
Select "Reinstall macOS" from the macOS Utilities window and follow the onscreen instructions to finish the installation.

If you encounter errors on the installation, go back to the Utilities window where you can access Disk Utility to erase your startup disk by following the steps below.

Open Disk Utilities > Continue.
Click View > Show All Devices.
Choose the top-level disk and click Erase.
Select Mac OS Extended as format.
Set scheme to GUID Partition Map.
Click Erase.
Then select "Reinstall macOS" to install the operating system.

If you still can't reinstall macOS, repeat the process in Internet Recovery Mode.

② Reinstall macOS from a bootable drive

Create a bootable macOS installer on another working Mac.
Power on your bricked Mac, then immediately press and hold the Option key until seeing the options to choose a startup disk.
Select the bootable installer and click the Up arrow.
Erase your startup disk and reinstall macOS as guided above.

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