Is this a bad hard drive cable?

[summerdream]

My mid-2009 MBP starts to act strangely lately, sometimes system won't boot, all kinds of I/O problems in the apps, beachballs. But when I put the HD into an external enclosure and boot from it, it works just fine. ps, I am running Lion 10.7.4 on it.

Can I conclude this is a internal hard drive cable failure? If it is, where can I get replacement? My AppleCare just expired less than 2 months ago...

 

[Mal]

Most likely, I've seen those fail on those models relatively often. While you could pick up the cable if you want from iFixIt (13" Model), it also should be a pretty cheap fix at an Apple Store or repair center. Worth looking into.

jW

 

[summerdream]

Ordered a cable from eBay for $20. Will see how it goes.

Most likely, I've seen those fail on those models relatively often. While you could pick up the cable if you want from iFixIt (13" Model), it also should be a pretty cheap fix at an Apple Store or repair center. Worth looking into.

jW

 

[snake1212]

I had the same thing happen to my Mid-2009. I replaced the hard drive cable and it was as good as new.

 

[whoknows87]

mine starts up gets stuck on the apple logo, apple told me HD issue , but in ur case it seems like it actually starts up and is functional at times so I would say order the cable and give it a shot.. good luck

 

[summerdream]

Actually most of the time it won't start (stuck at spinning wheel with apple logo). Even if it does boot into OSX, there are all kinds of problems.

mine starts up gets stuck on the apple logo, apple told me HD issue , but in ur case it seems like it actually starts up and is functional at times so I would say order the cable and give it a shot.. good luck

 

[summerdream]

Received the SATA cable yesterday and installed it right away. Meanwhile I popped in a new Vertex 3 120GB SSD, fresh install Mountain Lion. Everything is great so far. OSX boots up in 15 seconds and speed test shows 265/165mb/s read/write speed. No beachball/hang, no need to downgrade EFI to 1.6 on mid-2009 MBP.

Now I am waiting for Nimitz optibay to come so I can use 500GB Seagate Momentus XT as storage.