Why won't my MacBook recognise my new internal hard drive?

New internal harddrive not recognized ( My Fix )

To make a long story short.......

The new harddrive was physically thinner than the old one and that caused the SATA connections to miss. If you don't feel or hear it click when you slide it in then it's a miss..
My fix was with double sided tape.
I ran a strip from one end to the other, sticky side on the labeled side of the harddrive but left the plastic on the exposed side so as not to stick to the bay itself.
You will need to thicken the drive by about one quarter of an inch.
If you only have the thin double sided tape you will need to stack it.

The tape will cause some drag when you reinsert the drive, just move slowly, you may have to wiggle or push down on the drive to start it.

Also make sure you didn't mount the harddrive upside down on the caddy.

Feel for the click, no click equals no joy......

Brooklyn baby!

Well I have a mid 2010 17" mac book pro. Bought a WD Scorpio Black 750gb 7200RPm sata drive and ran into the issue upon doing a new install with Snow Leopard, having it hang at the gray apple logo screen and not moving forward with the install.

Took it out put the old drive back in, placed the new drive in a external case and formatted it extended / journaled. (If I recall correctly) Put the new drive back and tried again and got the same hang up, no install.

So what not able to run a 750GB 7200RPM drive?? Most of what I was able to find on forums and apple and so on has given me nothing solid to work with.

I even checked my firmware for the drive controller to make sure I had the most up to date one and I do.

Grrr The current drive is on the way out and I'm frustrated to no end right now.

I looked up my serial number on apple and it mentioned the specs for my system which states...500GB 5400-rpm Serial ATA hard drive; optional 500GB 7200-rpm hard drive, or 128GB, 256GB, or 512GB solid-state drive6
...So do I try a 500GB 7200RPM drive??

..."sigh" not sure what else to do and I dont want to keep spending money on drives to find one that works...

Are you sure the drive actually connected internally. Can you hear the drive spinning? It is not necessary for the drive to be preformatted , you can do that with your OS cd in the utilities section. But if your Mac doesnt even see the drive, then it may not be actually physically connected or the controller may be bad. Does your system see the old drive ok? First let us know if the new drive is actually spinning inside your MacBook.

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So I had the same problem, with my new internal hard drive not being recognised. To fix it I simply booted up my Mac with the external hard drive I was using as the back up, then opened 'Disk Utility', erased the new disk and boom, it appeared on the desktop. After cloning, I restarted and booted the Mac with the new drive and it worked perfectly. Hope this helps someone!

THRochester said:

Hi Finntastic, I have the same problem on my PowerBook 12". Installer doesn't recognise the hard drive which is brand new. Thank you for your help on the forum but I can't see how I can connect the HDD to the PC to reformat it first

Does this require specialist knowledge?
I'm about to give up all hope... Thanks

Click to expand...

My wife's 13" MacBook (Snow Leopard) failed to boot from the hard drive, so I booted from the external Snow Leopard disc, and ran Disk Utility. That informed me that the hard disc was corrupt. I have today bought a new hard disc drive, SATA 2.5, and installed it carefully, following the online instructions that one can find on YouTube and elsewhere.

However, Disk Utility does not seem able to find the new drive, and recognises only the OSX Installation-disc.

Is there some simple way of resolving this, or must I take the MacBook to a technician ?

I ran into this just yesterday. Installed the new hard drive only to find out that the system didn't see it at all! What I ended up doing (took all day - long and involved, this is the short version!) - used the Install disk to get to the Disk Utility; used the Disk Utility to erase the new hard drive once it was installed (WD Scorpio Blue, 1 TB, 5400 rpm). My husband said that it either had no format on it at all, or was formatted for Windows, so the Mac couldn't see it.

Tried to run the full backup and couldn't get it going. I was able to install the OS from the install disk, but then it didn't want to run the restore from disk utility because it said the OS on the hard drive was older than the OS on the restore disk. Did all my OS installs/ updates/ upgrades, then managed to do a full restore from the backup.

Hi,

I recently installed a Crucial 240GB harddrive on my white MacBook 2006. When it came to selecting a drive to install the OS disk on, no drives were showing up

So I went to Utilities - Disk Utility and found the new HD there. I then formatted the HD by clicking the Erase button. Rename the HD, select MAC OS Extended (Journaled).
I then restarted the laptop (I did this twice as the Installation Disk didn't show up the fist time) and the new renamed HD showed up perfectly - yay!

No need for Stat leads and all that

I also had it backed up using TimeMachine beforehand and the prompt just came up as one of the installation steps.

Check physical connection

Hi,
I had this same problem for weeks, and had already sent back a new HDD that my MacBook couldn't recognize. I had read about perhaps having to format/partition the HDD first, so ordered another HDD (a WD 320GB 7200 one), and finally realized there was a blockage in the hard drive bay, which is narrow enough that it's difficult to see inside.
Brooklyn567's post was on the right track for me, although I should have noted it sooner, because in fact the problem was a loose rubber guide strip along the side of the HDD slot that had come unglued and completely covered the SATA connection. I had to take the top shell off to see what I was doing (see http://youtu.be/wf-ZsDwIBfo)
There was also a thin, flimsy metal tab, to provide some tension under the HDD caddy, that had gotten twisted, which I was able to get nearly back on line, and I glued the black rubber guides back on both sides. I hadn't realized until this last attempt that the whole HDD assembly really refused to slide back far enough and click, but the Macbook is now working with a fresh install, much better than before. The process would have been easier on a desktop, but I'm glad to have finally solved it.

I bought and just installed a travelstar 1tb 7200 on my MacBook aluminum late 2008 model.

At first i had the same problem and it wasn't reading my new HD, checked all connections and rebooted it up using the old OS X install disc. You will have to go through a couple clicks and at the screen where your HD wasnt reading, go up at the top menu bar and click on utilities.

Scroll down to "disk utility" and it should read your HD and show on the left hand column. Create a new partition your new hard drive to work with Mac and that should only take a couple seconds to do. As soon as that is done your MacBook should be able to read your new HD.

Clean the contacts?

This problem drove me mad for 24 hours. New 1Tb WD Blue not seen internally but seen perfectly well externally. Tried everything and was on point of ordering new internal SATA cable. Then read here about cleaning contacts. Removed motherboard end of SATA cable (which had never been removed before), cleaned with soft brush and air-blower, and replaced making sure it was firm. And it has worked, at least through several consecutive startups so far. Perhaps it's coincidence but ....

Similar problem with 2006 Macbook not recognizing any of three new hard drives. When using Mac OS 10.4.6 instal discs Disc Utility wouldn't recognize the new hard drives. Put in a Mac OS 10.6 install disc and formatted and installed operating system with no problem. Hope this helps.

blevins321 said:

Hmm, no it probably came as bare (no format). Either that for FAT/NTFS. Whichever of those, the Mac would have recognized it at least, and allowed you to format it. It's possible you got one that was DOA..did you happen to notice if it was 'clicking'?

Click to expand...

[doublepost=1477731989][/doublepost]having a similar problem: help? have a BIPRA external hard drive that i connected to my MacBook. the first time i used it, it backed up my laptop. this time, i hear clicking, the light on it goes on, but my MacBook does not see it... i can't find it on the screen or anywhere. is it something with the port on the external hard drive? both my usb inputs on my mac work just fine.

miscreantics said:

Hi guys,
I realise that similar problems are posted all through these forums but I can't find one that has actually made a difference yet.
I've today installed a new 500g WD Scorpio Blue drive into my early '09 aluminium macbook. The install DVD will not recognise the new drive, and it does not show up in Disk Utility either - I just have a "Media" drive with a capacity of 0 bytes. I've tried a PRAM reset which hasn't helped, checked the SATA connection several times and am still getting nothing.
I'm hoping that it's just not formatted correctly and that for some reason this is why disk utility isn't recognising the drive, however I have never had this problem with any of my other WD gear so it seems quite strange.
Any help/advice will be very much appreciated.
Cheers

Click to expand...

[doublepost=1506181368][/doublepost]Easy fix, boot up holding command R and use disk utility to erase new drive and walla, its now a recognizable drive. Will

THRochester said:

Connecting the WD320Gb to a PC

Hi Finntastic, I have the same problem on my PowerBook 12". Installer doesn't recognise the hard drive which is brand new. Thank you for your help on the forum but I can't see how I can connect the HDD to the PC to reformat it first

Does this require specialist knowledge?
I'm about to give up all hope... Thanks

Click to expand...

What worked for me: Plug HDD into pc, run cmd as admin. Type DISKPART (enter ), LIST DISK ( enter ), Find your HDD and type SELECT DISK ( number ) (enter), CLEAN ( ENTER ) CONVERT GPT ( enter ). You should be good to go