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newdeal

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Oct 21, 2009
2,553
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Ok so I got a mid 2010 macbook pro 13 off ebay, the thing was having a lot of beach balling issues so I set off to fix it. I had some spare ram here so swapped it out, reset the smc and pram and it didn't help. What did the trick was replacing the hard drive with one I had sitting around. Reinstalling the OS did nothing also (I noticed it with snow leopard but formatted and installed Lion from scratch hoping it would fix the problem as a first step). I was wondering why a hard drive would do this and if there is any way to fix it for free? Its only a year old and it didn't make any funny noises just the beach balling issues and general laggyness. any input on that?
 
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Its out of warranty by a month. There is also dust behind the screen in one spot and a dead pixel.
 
Its out of warranty by a month. There is also dust behind the screen in one spot and a dead pixel.

Perhaps if you take it in and explain the situation, they'll cover the repair, but they don't have too since its out of warranty. The odds of them fixing it for free would have been higher had you brought it in sooner then later
 
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He'll have a difficult time saying its a lemon when apple has no record of any repairs.

Its over a year old and it works fine now that i replaced the drive. Not worth the time trying to see if apple will do anything. Just wanted to know why this happened and why a working drive would be beachballing
 
You could run various disk diagnosis applications on the drive and see if it has bad sectors or is otherwise corrupted. Or just reformat and see if it works as a storage drive.
 
He'll have a difficult time saying its a lemon when apple has no record of any repairs.

I should have been more clear - I meant return it to the eBay seller. The OP doesn't state how long he's had the laptop, only that it's a year old (he could have bought a year old laptop).
 
Its over a year old and it works fine now that i replaced the drive. Not worth the time trying to see if apple will do anything. Just wanted to know why this happened and why a working drive would be beachballing

All hard drives eventually fail. They will allow the machine to boot but will be extremely slow and quirky, for example.

A failing drive cannot be repaired, backup everything you've got on there and toss it, it's out of warranty anyway and there is nothing you can do. Hard drives are cheap, just replace it.
 
Yep. Replacing the drive is all you can do. If you really want to, I guess you can follow up with the drive's manufacturer to see if they cover it for longer than a year as most store purchased hard drives have 3 to 5 year warranties.

I'm leaning towards probably not (on the warranty) but it couldn't hurt to try.
 
Yep. Replacing the drive is all you can do. If you really want to, I guess you can follow up with the drive's manufacturer to see if they cover it for longer than a year as most store purchased hard drives have 3 to 5 year warranties.

I'm leaning towards probably not (on the warranty) but it couldn't hurt to try.

3 to 5 year warranties come on hard drives you buy separately, OEM drives usually carry the standard OEM 1yr warranty.
 
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