Can't See New Hard Drive In 2008 White Macbook

[jweeza]

Hi all,
My g/f's HD seemed to fail in the old white MB. It would just boot to a grey screen. After some research it seemed it had a bad HD, so I bought a new one (Seagate MomentusLP 320 SATA @ 5400rpm) and ordered a snow lion disc from apple, as the old one is MIA. Anyways. Put the new one in, booted from the install disc, but when it said to choose which drive to install onto, it showed none. Opened up Disc Utility, and nothing. Took the HD out and put it into a USB hd reader and it saw and installed onto the hd. I made sure to format to extended journaled or whatever and it all worked while in the usb reader. But, it doesnt work when installed IN the computer.

Any idea on what is going on. I did some searching, but no one seems to have an answer.

thanks

 

[mwhities]

Have you tried the old drive in the USB external enclosure? If that works, maybe it's the onboard controller that's gone bad.

Good luck.

 

[jweeza]

Yes. I tried the old drive in the enclosure, but no luck on that front either. I got it to be seen one time by the disc utility when it was in the mac, but when i tried to verify/repair/partition, it always failed.