Hi guys,
I'm not sure there is a place for resolved issues, but I wanted to share my MBP nightmare and solution with you all, in case others suffer what I had to go through.
A couple of weeks back, my HDD started to become a lot louder when writing/reading - not the dreaded clicking of death sound but a noticeable louder write hum. Thinking the HDD was dying I backed up waiting for its inevitable death.
A couple of days later I booted up and viola, could not boot. Just the apple logo and spinning cursor. My bootcamp partition was also not booting. The HDD was shot so I thought.
After trying to repair using diskwarrior and diskutilty - with no luck from either (drive cannot be repaired), I bit the bullet and bought a new WD 750gb drive. Having built computers before and being fairly familiar to MacBooks I installed it myself, but on restarting from my osx intall disk, disk utility would not even recognise the drive was in there. I checked it was correctly seated again, so I decided to take it out, mount it externally and format it on my main mac.
The mac recognised it instantly, even though it was unformatted, and i proceeded to format it correctly for the MBP - osx journaled, GUID partition.
Popped the drive back into the MBP - still nothing. I left frustrated, and returned the next day try one more time. disk utility recognised the drive, but failed when I went to restore to it from my time machine backup. I mounted the drive externally again and ran diagnostics and the drive seemed fine - after extensive googling and chats I found a lot of people with the same hard drive recognition problems, most were solved - mainly die to sata speed issues, incorrect HDD jumper settings, bad OSX discs etc. I was advised it may be the drive not being compatible or a SATA speed issue - my system profiler showed my SATA speed was 3gbp/s which was correct.
So i went and bought a like for like replacement of the old drive - a seagate momentus 500gb. I first mounted this in a caddy on my main mac and again formatted it correctly. Back in the MBP - nothing. I experimented with various drives, I found that a 250gb WD Scorpio blue would ALWAYS work, whereas others were intermittent - some would be recognised but could not be formatted or written to, some didn't work at all, some booted then stopped. Even the original 'broken' drive sometimes booted!
However this was impractical and in the end nothing booted. I was tearing my hair out and couldn't find any more info on the net, until I came across a few individuals mentioning that they had the same problems, and as a last resort were going to install a newSATA flex cable that connects the drive to the logic board, as perhaps it was damaged. Many were not hopeful as, like me, some drives seemed fine. These forums posts were months old, and there was no indication if this had resolved the issue or not.
Anyway, I took the gamble and shed nearly £60 on a brand new cable. Installed today.....
Every drive is recognised. I couldn't be happier - it was a risk but it paid off. I have since learnt that the flex cable sends different streams of signal, so if some areas were damaged some data could sill get through etc- hence the intermittent workings.
I hope this can be of help to people, as I have seen numerous unresolved posts on the issue around the web. The flex cable seems very flimsy - not by fault but by obvious design - born out of necessity to conserve space.
Don't let the fact that a drive is sometimes recognised fool you, the cable may still be damaged.
Thankyou and moderators feel free to move my post where it belongs.
I'm not sure there is a place for resolved issues, but I wanted to share my MBP nightmare and solution with you all, in case others suffer what I had to go through.
A couple of weeks back, my HDD started to become a lot louder when writing/reading - not the dreaded clicking of death sound but a noticeable louder write hum. Thinking the HDD was dying I backed up waiting for its inevitable death.
A couple of days later I booted up and viola, could not boot. Just the apple logo and spinning cursor. My bootcamp partition was also not booting. The HDD was shot so I thought.
After trying to repair using diskwarrior and diskutilty - with no luck from either (drive cannot be repaired), I bit the bullet and bought a new WD 750gb drive. Having built computers before and being fairly familiar to MacBooks I installed it myself, but on restarting from my osx intall disk, disk utility would not even recognise the drive was in there. I checked it was correctly seated again, so I decided to take it out, mount it externally and format it on my main mac.
The mac recognised it instantly, even though it was unformatted, and i proceeded to format it correctly for the MBP - osx journaled, GUID partition.
Popped the drive back into the MBP - still nothing. I left frustrated, and returned the next day try one more time. disk utility recognised the drive, but failed when I went to restore to it from my time machine backup. I mounted the drive externally again and ran diagnostics and the drive seemed fine - after extensive googling and chats I found a lot of people with the same hard drive recognition problems, most were solved - mainly die to sata speed issues, incorrect HDD jumper settings, bad OSX discs etc. I was advised it may be the drive not being compatible or a SATA speed issue - my system profiler showed my SATA speed was 3gbp/s which was correct.
So i went and bought a like for like replacement of the old drive - a seagate momentus 500gb. I first mounted this in a caddy on my main mac and again formatted it correctly. Back in the MBP - nothing. I experimented with various drives, I found that a 250gb WD Scorpio blue would ALWAYS work, whereas others were intermittent - some would be recognised but could not be formatted or written to, some didn't work at all, some booted then stopped. Even the original 'broken' drive sometimes booted!
However this was impractical and in the end nothing booted. I was tearing my hair out and couldn't find any more info on the net, until I came across a few individuals mentioning that they had the same problems, and as a last resort were going to install a newSATA flex cable that connects the drive to the logic board, as perhaps it was damaged. Many were not hopeful as, like me, some drives seemed fine. These forums posts were months old, and there was no indication if this had resolved the issue or not.
Anyway, I took the gamble and shed nearly £60 on a brand new cable. Installed today.....
Every drive is recognised. I couldn't be happier - it was a risk but it paid off. I have since learnt that the flex cable sends different streams of signal, so if some areas were damaged some data could sill get through etc- hence the intermittent workings.
I hope this can be of help to people, as I have seen numerous unresolved posts on the issue around the web. The flex cable seems very flimsy - not by fault but by obvious design - born out of necessity to conserve space.
Don't let the fact that a drive is sometimes recognised fool you, the cable may still be damaged.
Thankyou and moderators feel free to move my post where it belongs.