MacBook not seeing new hdd?

[andysmith]

Bit of a strange one, this.

My wife has a black MacBook that's approx 12 months old, and the stock 160gb HDD has started to fail. I've purchased a new disk, a Western Digital WD3200BEVT, which judging by reviews online, should work fine in a MacBook.

So I fitted the new HDD and booted off the restore DVD, but the new HDD was not seen by Disk Utility. However, it appeared in System Profiler, and identified correctly. I put the drive in an external USB SATA enclosure, and it was picked up without a problem by Disk Utility on my iMac. I formatted it as HFS+ with GUID, and put the drive back in the MacBook. Still nothing.

Anyone got any ideas? Really scratching my head here.

 

[clyde2801]

Format to mac journaled under disk utility first, and then install leopard. Or get a sata cable and use carbon copy cloner to clone your old drive to your new one. That's the 7200 rpm 320 gig scorpio black, right?

 

[andysmith]

No, just a 5400rpm Scorpio.

Like I said, Disk Utility on the Install disc doesn't see the drive. The original drive seems to have a lot of bad sectors so I can't clone it - I need to restore from a Time Machine backup.

 

[misterredman]

Try resetting the PRAM and the SMC.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1411


Have the exact same drive in my black Macbook too. Still working fine after many months.

 

[andysmith]

Tried resetting both the PRAM and SMC with no luck.

In the end I resorted to using a WD2500BEVS (250gb WD) that I had lying around. Works fine.