What to Do If EFI Partition Gets Corrupted on Mac System?

If the EFI partition is damaged, Mac system will malfunction in many aspects, such as system failure to boot up, etc. In a nutshell, broken EFI partition will cause lots of troubles. You’d better resolve it as soon as possible. This article will give you a quick guide.

Although EFI partition getting corrupted is not a common occurrence, it still can occur to Mac system abruptly. Many factors can cause its damage, including virus attack, bad sectors, power cut, software or hardware issues and so on. Usually, at that point, Mac system will tend to fail to boot up. And system software will be unable to load as normal. Mac may get stuck at the startup screen with an Apple Logo and a wait cursor spinning. In this case, you will be incapable of accessing your Mac data. You may be afraid of data corruption, like Outlook corruption. So, it is imperative to repair this quickly. Here we will tell what you should do in this scenario.

1. Reinstall System with Internet Recovery

If your Mac cannot boot up at all, you can select to reinstall system with Internet Recovery. But you should ensure a stable and high speed internet connection.

1. First off, reboot Mac.
2. Then, during boot, hold down “Command + Option + R” key button.
3. When a spinning globe icon appears on the screen, you have entered Internet Recovery mode.
4. Also, there is a progress bar, which refers to that the recovery functions are being downloaded
5. When finished downloading, in the subsequent “OS X Utilities” screen, you should choose “Reinstall OS X”.
6. Lastly, specify the destination and perform Mac system re-installation.

2. Reinstall System with Regular Recovery Mode

If Mac recovery partition is able to work as normal, but not the primary system, it is also a good option to reinstall system through normal recovery mode.

1. To start with, reboot your Mac.
2. Then, hold down “Command + R” key button during reboot until the loading screen appears.
3. In the “OS X Utilities” screen, you need to connect Mac to Internet.
4. After that, you can choose “Reinstall OS X”
5. Next, choose the target hard drive to reinstall Mac system onto.
6. Later, the recovery drive will download the essential components for system re-installation on the target drive.
7. Subsequently, Mac will automatically reinstall and reboot several times until it gets recovered.

3. Scan & Repair Drive with Disk Utility

After reinstalling system, you will find Mac functioning properly. Yet, even so, you should keep in mind that the broken EFI partition indicates Mac hard disk failure is impending. Therefore, you have to attempt to repair the problems on the disk. Fortunately, Mac has an inbuilt disk repair tool – Disk Utility. You can launch it to scan disk and try to fix existing disk issues.

4. Test Hardware Issues with Apple Diagnostics

Plus, there is another internal tool – Apple Diagnostics (Apple Hardware Test on Macs built in 2013 and before). It can test the Mac hardware for problems.

1. At the outset, connect Mac to a power source. And remove all the connected devices from the Mac.
2. Then, reboot the Mac.
3. When the screen turns from black to grey, hold down “D” key until you see a progress bar.
4. After that, follow onscreen wizard to run this hardware test tool.
5. If problems detected, this tool will inform you with an error.

Author Introduction:

Shirley Zhang is a data recovery expert in DataNumen, Inc., which is the world leader in data recovery technologies, including recover mdf and outlook repair software products. For more information visit www.datanumen.com