Harddrive woes

[Shotglass]

So my brother has this 1st gen MacBook. We bought two when they were released, one for him and one for my sister. My sister's was a total failure, it had basically every defect there was. Since she isn't too much on the bright side, she didn't take it into the store until after the warranty. She paid an arm and a leg for a logic board replacement, it works moderately well now.
Now my brother's MacBook worked like a charm for a year or two. Then, the 80GB Seagate harddrive that came with it stopped working, it showed me the folder/question mark icon on bootup. I didn't know it was a known problem, and I had another HD handy, so I just swapped them and went on. A few days ago, that harddrive did the same thing. I put my own 250GB Samsung in, the same thing happened. I am desperate.

 

[myuserid08]

Sounds like you have a logic board problem there, do the hard drives work in another machine?

 

[vniow]

Its possible the other hard drive has gone bad as well. If it works on another machine and there's no errors with it, bitch at Apple about the logic board repair and hope that they'll replace it with a working one. If its the hard drive, its likely still under warranty if relatively new. You did say it was just laying around right? Try it in another machine, via direct swap or cheap external enclosure.

 

[Shotglass]

Just to clarify: The MacBook I'm talking about right now never had any problems save for a battery failure. The harddrive I put in was figuratively 'lying around'. Not as in stored inappropriately for 12 years.

It might be a logic board failure, myuserid08, but I have no way of testing that. My sister and her MacBook live elsewhere. The harddrives I put into the MacBook all worked fine previously.

 

[myuserid08]

The harddrives I put into the MacBook all worked fine previously.

Do they now?

 

[Shotglass]

I cloned my mother's OS X onto an external USB drive and tried booting it. It worked! The clamshell mode is still flimsy though, and the whole thing feels buggy (can't describe it, might be imagination). Anyway, I will test the harddrives again later.