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Is my macbook pro broken or just new hard drived needed?

H

Helpmac24

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 12, 2012
17
0
Hey all im new here and ran into a problen with my mac. First of all im not a noob when it comes to conputers however this was my first mac.

I believe my hard drive failed when it accidently fell off a bed. I removef the bottom cover anf when I go to turn it on I will hear the regular apple theme then I would hear the hard drive sorta like a car rev. Then the screen shows a blinking folder wiyh questiion mark.

I then formatted a 20gig hard drive with my xbox plugged it into the macbook and it still shows blinking folder obv( no os and no car rev sound).

I then proceed to put my snow leopard retail disc in and my cd slot will not takr the disc i even tried pushing it all the way in.

I have the 2010 macbook pro

problems?
Hard drive?
Disc player?
time for new macbook?
 
It's your hard drive. Bring it in and for a mere 300 they'll replace it for u. Yay.Hope u backed it up. Mine has failed 5x in 14 months.
 
esayer said:
It's your hard drive. Bring it in and for a mere 300 they'll replace it for u. Yay.Hope u backed it up. Mine has failed 5x in 14 months.
Click to expand...

Thanks for replying back. I kinda thought that was the only problem until my cd wouldnt even accept my retail mac leopard disc.

I dont want to bring it in because I know how to do the install of a fresh windows and mac which would save my pockets.

300 to bring it

90 if I do it
60 250g HD
30 snow leopard retail disc

Which is why I wanted to see if someone may please help me if these two are the main problems from the problems I desribed above.

I just noticed that I might of damage my cd slot it was open on a corner I unplugged it and took it out anf noticed one side of the cd slot was popped open and I could slightly see the inside...cause of the slot not accepting cds?
needs to be replaced also? where could I get one?


Thanks everyone for your help I just want to go out and get the supplies but I want make sure I am not wasting my money.
 
I would suggest getting a new hard drive and see.

Last weekend, I dropped my macbook pro from 5 ft high onto tile while it was one. Good thing the screen wasn't cracked, but after booting up a few times, my osx would stuck at the startup with apple logo showing. I have bootcamp partition and that is working fine. When I did verity/repair in Disk Ultility, everything is fine though.

But aftering replacing hard drive, everything seems to work fine. The hinge seems a bit loose, but it's usable.

So in my case, the new harddrive seems to fix it.
 
Ok here is the bottom line.

Your HDD is DEAD and needs to be replaced.

It also sounds like your DVD drive, optical drive, is also DEAD. Which happens way to often with Mac notebooks, IMHO.

You will need a working optical drive to reload the OS once you change out the HDD.

You can try buying an External optical drive that connect to the USB port/ports as I think Mac will boot a OS X install DVD from an external. But I am not sure about that ( I know it wouldn't boot a Win 7 DVD from an external but I think that is a limitation Apple created).
You could also use someone else's Mac to image that install DVD and then load that image on a thumb drive to do the reinstall.

Good Luck and in the future don't drop your computer. It's not that hard to make sure it is on a solid footing, not on the Edge of a Bed.
 
Thanks for replying.

Are you 100% sure if I buy an external usb cd drive it will detect it and work right out of the box?
 
Yeah, generally the fast thing in a computer to die from shock is the Hard Disk Drive. However, as others have said, that does not mean other things are not messed up. You can get a hard disk drive pretty cheap. However, with a broken optical drive, that won't do you much good in itself. You need to get a startup disk on a USB drive, which I know you can do with Lion but not sure about Snow Leopard. Once, and if, you can get it to that point, you should do the Apple Hardware Test. Traditionally, this is found on the install CD but that won't do you much good if your optical drive is messed up, and so you are going to need to figure out how to do an install via the USB drive, or how others have said. Apple will likely be able to tell you the best way to do it. I imagine if all else fails you can do a USB/Wifi install of Lion (provided nothing else is damaged).
 
NickZac said:
Yeah, generally the fast thing in a computer to die from shock is the Hard Disk Drive. However, as others have said, that does not mean other things are not messed up. You can get a hard disk drive pretty cheap. However, with a broken optical drive, that won't do you much good in itself. You need to get a startup disk on a USB drive, which I know you can do with Lion but not sure about Snow Leopard. Once, and if, you can get it to that point, you should do the Apple Hardware Test. Traditionally, this is found on the install CD but that won't do you much good if your optical drive is messed up, and so you are going to need to figure out how to do an install via the USB drive, or how others have said. Apple will likely be able to tell you the best way to do it. I imagine if all else fails you can do a USB/Wifi install of Lion (provided nothing else is damaged).
Click to expand...

Thanks for taking the time to help man.

I have done an install through USB before but that was only with lion osx after snow leopard was installed. I just don't understand how the macbook will install an external cd drive when there is nothing to begin with.

I'm afraid that it might be more than just a hard drive and my super cd drive. I am 100% positive that my hard drive and super cd drive are not working.

Blinking folder with question mark is what I get when I boot up the macbook pro. I'll hear the chime of the apple start up then it'll be a white screen for a couple seconds then it would show the blinking folder. This happens even when I plug a new hard drive (only 20gb) but a part of me tells me if I somehow get the mac os install start up, it'll send me to the partion page and such. This is getting frustrating, I'm about to just buy a PC:mad:
 
Alright I did some researching and have found out that I can make a bootable MAC OS snow leopard retail by making an image (DMB or ISO) then using a software to format my USB flash drive(atleast 8 gb) or EXTERNAL hard drive.

I will just have to format the drive to be bootable and restore the img/iso/dmb on the USB flash drive. Of course I will have to make image on a different computer. I will give this a shot tomorrow and will come back and post up the verdict. Should help someone in the future with the same issues I hope...
 
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