MacBook Pro 15 UNI New Hard Drive install problem. Help please.

[joen1227]

Hi

I'm pretty much new to MAC.

I bought a 500 GIGs HD 7200 rpm hitachi HD about a month ago. installed the hard drive. Then run Installation OS X DVD. Formated the HD to MAC OS Extended (Journaled) And about 75% of the installation it would stop. (I noticed that the completion time was change to an hour to 5 hours then just stop.)

So thinking it was a bad Hard drive and exchange it for another. I went back to the store 3 times to change the hard drive. Even change it to 320 gigs and still same problem again. Thinking it was my DVD drive. So I tried it with my old hard drive that came with my MBP it went smooth. Even change memory from my mac Mini. Still nothing.

Trying to eliminate all problems I even installed the 500gigs HD to my Mac Mini. run the installation disk and everything was OK.

I even tried doing the OPT+CMD+R+P command on start up. and still nothing.

Do I need to do something special to install/change the hard drive?

Please help.

Thank you in advance.

**** MacBook Pro 15 inch Unibody 2.53GHZ Intel 4GB DDR3 Mac OS X 10.5.8 ****

 

[Kneedragon]

It's possible that the EFI 1.7 update is causing the beachball problem, which is making the installation take a lot longer than expected.

Try this: Put your old hard drive back in (with your existing OSX install) and clone it to the new hard drive. Then swap in your new drive. If you get the beachball issue described in this thread:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/729883/

then try downgrading your EFI to 1.6.

 

[jjahshik32]

I'm curious, when did you purchase your 15" uMBP?

Because I remember early last year when I had the 15" uMBP, there were SATA-II issues (even with the 1.7fw) where it wont take SATA-II HDDs.

I believe for a little while Apple has shipped the older 15" uMBP with no SATA-II support. This was one of the reason why I returned the 15" as I put in a hitachi travelstar 7200rpm SATA-II HDD and it kept freezing no matter what (and I've updated to the 1.7 firmware).

Also the stock 500GB HDD that Apple includes is an SATA-I HDD.