I am going to throw my Macbook out the window :P

[AshMan]

Take it to an apple store genius. They may be more helpful than apple on the phone. It's worth a shot

you could also use an external DVD drive to do a reinstall on a replacement hard drive and or boot up to disk utility to see if hard drive is reconized.

 

[gnasher729]

The hard drive just died for the second time. (At least, that's what we surmise; we get the blinking folder with the question mark when we reboot it. The disc drive died some time ago, so we can't run the Snow Leopard disc to check for sure.)

Your MacBook would be three to four years old. That's about twice as old as any non-Apple laptop in my family has lasted 😀

My recommendation from the start would have been (it's too late for you now): Buy an external hard drive for Time Machine backups; add a small partition (8 GB) and copy your original OS DVD onto it. This is mostly because many people tend to lose their original DVDs, but obviously helps when the DVD drive dies.

As a workaround, if you know anyone with a Macintosh, buy an 8 or 16 GB USB stick and copy Snow Leopard onto it, then boot from the USB stick.

 

[Fast/Furious]

How is it that I struggle to get get malware even if I try in Windows, yet everyone on this site makes it sound like it's easy? In the last 3 years Ive not been infected, and have come across 1 trojan in a keygen, that was detected. I dont ever have to clean install to keep my OS's running smooth and I havent had a HDD crash, like I said earlier, in my whole life of PC's ('92-'93ish). (Vista ran for 2 years on 1 install upgraded to W7 which has ran for a year which is still going smooth). My Dell laptop is still going strong from 2007. It just replaced my Gateway from ~2000 which we finally dumped which was still running.

I'm guessing you don't watch porn. 😀

 

[Mike225]

I'm guessing you don't watch porn. 😀

No, Im still waiting for my Android phone to come in.

 

[Sun Baked]

You can go down to Best Buy and get a new notebook drive for $50.

If you want to save all the data on the drive, you can likely try rebuilding the b-tree catalog using fsck in single user mode. If you can boot into single user mode, using this version of fsck might get rid of the flashing ? mark if the drive is still partially working.

---

Sort of sad these days, but hard drives are more akin to consumables like batteries, than parts of the machine that outlast the computer.

 

[Sanveann]

Thanks for all the suggestions, guys 🙂 I got a new laptop today ... I think we were just ready to be DONE with the Macbook. With the hard drive issues, the power-cord issues, the non-working optical drive -- oh, and the fact that it constantly came disconnected from our wireless network for no apparent reason -- I think we were ready to move on! (And once we sell the parts, we won't really be out much money at all in the end.)

My iPhone keeps staring at me accusingly, though ...

 

[TopHatPlus]

Thanks for all the suggestions, guys 🙂 I got a new laptop today ... I think we were just ready to be DONE with the Macbook. With the hard drive issues, the power-cord issues, the non-working optical drive -- oh, and the fact that it constantly came disconnected from our wireless network for no apparent reason -- I think we were ready to move on! (And once we sell the parts, we won't really be out much money at all in the end.)

My iPhone keeps staring at me accusingly, though ...

hehe sorry to hear about your mis fortune, i have a 2007 black macbook and i love it =D haha i had my hard drive crash about 3 weeks ago, but other then that i have never ever ever had any issues other then a missing folder once but i upgraded to snow leopard and it was all good, i am purchasing a new 15" mbp though =D haha what laptop did you buy for curiosity?

 

[Sanveann]

We had Snow Leopard upgrade issues too ... I almost forgot about that! I think it was an issue with FileVault. Luckily, we'd been backing up with CrashPlan, so we didn't lose anything!

I got one of the Toshiba Satellite models. It was a good price, and it got pretty good reviews. Seems to be working fine so far 🙂 (Though I'd be pretty disappointed if it didn't after less than a day!)

 

[J&JPolangin]

... (Though I'd be pretty disappointed if it didn't after less than a day!)

...update this thread a year from now and let us know how your "new" Toshiba is working out for you?...

I'm not trying to bash Toshiba ~6 months ago I just sold a 7 year old 1905-s303 for $300 USD! - it ran hot, the battery wouldn't last more than 45 minutes and it weighed 8.85 lbs = but it still worked well with 1Gb of RAM (2x512Mb) and an upgraded 80Gb IDE HDD... I got my money's worth out of it!

 

[Sanveann]

Will do! 😀

 

[Synchromesh]

FYI I ran Vista on a crappy bargain-basement Gateway laptop that lasted for literally 1.5 years. Meanwhile, the desktop PC I built myself is still happily chugging away after 4 years.... go figure!

When you buy junk you get junk performance and reliability. Don't buy cheap crap. If you bought a used Thinkpad for same price instead I bet $$$ it would last a lot longer and give you less headache. This is also very true of cars. I would much rather have a good used car than a crappy new car.

I do agree that both OSes have limitations but to make a long story short you didn't almost fail an AP Grade 12 course (read: I almost missed a serious chance at a university scholarship) because your WinVista laptop decided to give up the ghost (viruses, endless BSODs, wouldn't even start up after a while). Only reason I got a second chance was because my teacher was luckily very computer-savvy and gave me a 2 night extension plus loaned me a school MacBook after I brought in my laptop and showed him what was wrong with it plus the unfinished paper. I think anyone would be quite bitter after that.

It doesn't require a Rocket Science degree to figure out that Vista is junk. And that's why I skipped it and continued to use XP x64 with a good firewall until W7 came out. Then I gave it a little while to mature and viola! Smooth transition with very small amount of issues.

To sum it all up - exercise brains before buying a system. Ie, research hardware, don't buy the first laptop you see because it's cheap. A previous gen dual-core Thinkpad T-series can be had for $400-500 with some warranty left over. Those are well-built sturdy computers that last a while. Then, look at software reviews - if people are suffering with Vista, don't use Vista. Stick with what works well - used to be XP, now 7.

So there are two ways to get a good system: pay a boatload of money to Apple and get a system that will more-or-less work out of the box. Or get a well-functioning PC platform that will do pretty much the same thing for a lot less but it will require basic research and brain use before buying.

 

[Sanveann]

...update this thread a year from now and let us know how your "new" Toshiba is working out for you?...

I'm not trying to bash Toshiba ~6 months ago I just sold a 7 year old 1905-s303 for $300 USD! - it ran hot, the battery wouldn't last more than 45 minutes and it weighed 8.85 lbs = but it still worked well with 1Gb of RAM (2x512Mb) and an upgraded 80Gb IDE HDD... I got my money's worth out of it!

Not quite a year later ... but I was just thinking about this thread, and I have a baby due in a month, so I doubt I'll be thinking about it much more in the next couple of months 🙂

Anyway, the Toshiba is still running great -- using it right now, actually. Hasn't given me any trouble whatsoever, and it still looks great, too.

My husband has softened toward Apple in the past year; he now really wants an iPhone and seems very impressed with my new iPad 2. I doubt I'll ever convince him to get another Apple laptop, though!

 

[Blondie :)]

Just like my girlsfriend's White Macbook who's on her 3rd HDD.

Meanwhile Ive never had any of my PC HDD's fail since the early 90's. 😉

Take it for what it's worth

it's definitely luck of the draw. I've never once had a HDD fail in any of my macs. But, when I used to have pc's, I had them fail all the time. I had 3 HDD's fail in my last toshiba laptop...and then the motherboard failed. Worst computer I've ever owned in my life. Which is why I switched to mac. I feel like most windows computers have very shoddy quality to them. I feel that the Macs are much better built.

 

[ThomasBoss]

Not quite a year later ... but I was just thinking about this thread, and I have a baby due in a month, so I doubt I'll be thinking about it much more in the next couple of months 🙂

Anyway, the Toshiba is still running great -- using it right now, actually. Hasn't given me any trouble whatsoever, and it still looks great, too.

My husband has softened toward Apple in the past year; he now really wants an iPhone and seems very impressed with my new iPad 2. I doubt I'll ever convince him to get another Apple laptop, though!

Good to know your computer is behaving lol...
I am a MacBook Pro owner and I have no plans of going back to Windows but I must say some Mac owners really give PCs a bad name...yes, PCs get far more viruses then macs but you know what the best anti virus is? Common Sense 2011 lol...and they can last a long time if you look after them...my parent's IBM Thinkpad is almost a decade old and only now is starting to show some issues of dying...
BTW congratulations on having a baby🙂🙂

 

[blackburn]

I've got friends with macbooks with 3 to 4 years old with no trouble. And yet mine had the bottom plate, the lcd and the hard drive swapped by apple.

And I don't even count with my gf macbook pro that is crap. (loses the clock, turns of at random, stops charging, makes weird noises when listening to music, the list goes on...).
She got pissed at me because I recommended her apple, her old asus notebook with the dreaded nvidia gpus still works fine (it's all broken due to abuse but it works fine). She already had the display swapped due to lousy hinges, and still I have to take her macbook pro to repairs once again, it's really annoying.

Guess some people are lucky others are not. At least my ipod still works fine😀.
(*knocks on wood*)

 

[jonwatt]

Airborne MacBook

Sounds strange,

My MacBook opened with the flashing Apple and couldn't find OS.
I restarted it with the Book standing on it's edges on the desk, and viola
it has worked ever since???

Daft, but anything is worth a try.

 

[omicron]

Sorry to hear about your problems OP. Sometimes people get really unlucky with computer hardware. Out of every batch of hard drives made, some are bound to die eventually.

If the MacBook has a hard drive bay that's easily replaceable, hard drives can be had for cheap on Newegg. On the tune of $50-$60. Although I don't think it would hurt to ask nicely to a potentially sympathetic Genius.