Installed New Hard Drive—Erase Failed; Bad Cable?

[MacConvert2007]

I’ve got a mid-2009 15-inch MacBook Pro running OS X 10.11.6
It started failing to start up giving errors. Booted off installation disk and ran disk utility. Repair didn’t work. Erase failed. Everyone thought I had a bad hard drive.

Bought new Sata hard drive. Installed it (And I’ve done this before successfully). Ran disk utility again. Erase failed again with an input/output error. Does this mean I have a bad cable? Or could it be a worse problem?

Can someone point me to the correct cable I can buy please? My Seagate Firecuda Gaming SSHD (ST2000LX001) didn’t come with one. It is 2 TB SATA with 6 GB/s. 2.5 inch with 7mm thickness.

Does this mean my old hard drive might be fine too?

Thanks so much for any and all help.

 

[Audit13]

My friend had a 2009 15" MBP and his hard was sometimes not detected. Once he changed the hard drive cable, the drive was detected after several reboots. He's been using the MBP for about three months and everything is fine.

The sata cable he bought was an inexpensive third party cable with good reviews from an Amazon.

I had a mid 2010 13" MBP where I could erase the drive but not install an os. As soon as I changed the cable, the os installed without any problems.

Yes, it is possible that the old drive is fine. The cables on the 2009 to 2012 MBPs are known to suffer from failed drive cables.

 

[vkd]

I had a weird situation where RAM made it seem like HD probs, swapped HD and no change, swapped out RAM and cured it. Try taking your RAM out and see if any change.

 

[seagate_surfer]

You just need a standard SATA cable, just make sure and pick one up with good reviews. The old drive may still be good if the problem didn't change when you replaced the drive in the system, you could hook the old one up to a computer, run our free diagnostic tool SeaTools on it, and see what it has to say about what kind of shape the old drive is in. If you end up with multiple HDDs on your hands and not enough spots for them, you could always buy an external case that fits one of the drives and turn it into an external for something like backup purposes or extra storage.