Hard Drive Failure MBP Late 2009

[Shayne R]

Hey everyone,

I went to open a pdf in Preview when a blue screen with the spinning load indicator appeared. It stayed on this screen for about 10 minutes then I manually shut down with the power button. When I went to restart the flashing folder with a question mark awaited. I attempted to select the startup disk with the option key but only got the mouse cursor. Inserted the Snow leopard disk and attempted to select the startup disk that way but my hard drive would not show up. I can still hear my disk spinning but I am assuming it has failed. Before I go out and buy a new disk tomorrow I am going to attempt to load it as a target disk from a Imac at my university but I want to make sure that it is the hard drive and not some other issue. Any other thoughts?

 

[Makosuke]

If you don't see the drive appearing at all in Disk Utility when booted from the install DVD (as opposed to the drive appearing, but with no volume listed under it), there's a very good chance that the hard drive failed. It could theoretically be a different piece of hardware, but that's much less likely. You can also bring up System Profiler, select the Serial ATA section, and see if anything shows up connected to the port.

If you have a USB-SATA converter or toaster-style drive dock laying around, the easy way to confirm would be to remove the hard drive, hook it up to another computer via that, and see if anything shows up. The hard drive is easy enough to pull, and you'll have to do that anyway, so it's an easy experiment to try if you have access to the hardware. If you don't, it's cheap (you can find docks or adapters for around $30), but you'd have to wait for it to show up, so maybe that's not the most efficient option.

 

[Shayne R]

Unfortunately it seem the less likely hardware failure option may be the cause. My new drive is also not showing up in disk utility and system profiler reports an error when attempting to connect to the sata port.