Dead 10.5 Install...

[smiddlehurst]

Hey folks, just wondering if anyone can shed some light on a problem with a summer 2007 17" MBP.

Started it up this morning and it'll go to the usual grey screen with apple logo and spinning circle beneath it but no further. After a couple of minutes the fan starts kicking in and getting faster and faster but it will NOT boot into OS X.

Tried starting up with the shift key down for safe mode and same thing on boot, wouldn't go past the grey screen.

Started up with the 10.5 install disc and launching disk utility. Disk Utility will show the hard drive but no partition on it and so there are no options to repair it. There was a verify option on the disk but that didn't actually seem to do anything. I've left it running for about 10 minutes to see if it would pick up the partition but nothing.

Booted up with command S and ran an FSCK -y which promptly went into a loop unable to fix the problem it found.

The machine works fine when it goes into the 10.5 installer so I'm leaning towards a dead (or at least not well) hard drive at this point. I'll grab a suitable firewire cable in the week and try running the machine in target disk mode to get any remaining data off it but is it fair to say the drive is most likely going to need replacing? And of course if anyone has any suggestions they'd be very much appreciated

 

[smiddlehurst]

Hmm, a bit more work and I'm pretty sure the drive has had it. Got really bored and decided to try reinstalling 10.5 on the old drive. The install process hung when trying to find a disk and going in with disk utility and trying to erase the disk brings back a 'resource busy' message. Bugger.

I'll grab a spare drive and see what happens if I swap out. Hopefully that'll work and it'll be a working MBP again, if not... anyone know how much a spares or repair 17" 2.4 C2D goes for?

 

[smiddlehurst]

Right, after a couple of hours and much swearing the new drive is in and working fine. Looks hopeful that it was just a dead drive (although 3 years of light duty shouldn't really kill a modern drive IMO).

One thing I did learn was the old pre-unibody MBP is a sod to work on. For a kick off... why Torx screws? Thankfully I've got the necessary bits in work but not something that most will have hanging around. Second, and this is more of a genius problem, this particular machine had the top case replaced under warranty and whoever fitted it managed to over-tighten three of the side screws. Two came out, the other is welded solid in the machine. Thankfully I could get enough movement from the top case to tilt it up out the way to get to the hard drive mountings. Three, the smaller case screws are a massive pain to get back in, a little TOO small to be worked with comfortably.

Other than that though, everything was pretty straightforward and hopefully all is right with the world as far as the MBP is concerned. Now just got to repatch and reinstall the necessary apps and get the data back on from Time Machine.