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Macbook Pro Hard Drive Problem

M

mrhat

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 4, 2009
19
0
Hi everyone, I'm running into a problem with my MBP. I have a mid 2010 MBP that I replaced the Superdrive with an SSD. I run OSX off the SSD, and have the HD partitioned where half of it is for bootcamp and the other half is storage for OSX.

Today, when I packed up after work and put my laptop in my bag, apparently it never went to sleep. When I got home, the laptop was burning hot to the touch. I force shut it down with the power button, and let it cool down. Upon restart, I can only boot from the SSD. I pulled the hard drive out and hooked it up to my desktop, and backed all my files up, but when I put it back in the MBP, I am still unable to boot from it. So I know this drive isn't fried because I was able to back up everything from it to my desktop.

Anyone have any idea why I can see the drive from my desktop, but not when its in my MBP? Thanks.
 
*edited*

The only thing I can think of is swap the SSD with the HDD, and see if the SSD works where the HDD was in order to check if the connection did not get damaged.
 
Thanks for the help guys, I ended up solving the problem. I went into disk utilitiy on OSX and had it check the disk, and it showed errors. So I booted from the OSX install disk on my external DVD drive, ran disk repair, and it fixed it up. Rebooted, and the bootcamp drive was functional and working just fine.
 
Well I take that back....after I was able to boot into my bootcamp drive, I let it sit for a while. Then when I tried to open a program, it locked up on me and I had to do a force restart. Now I no longer have the option to boot from the bootcamp drive, and I can't see it in OSX. I have no clue what to do now. I tried using the OSX setup disk like I did last time and that doesn't work. Any ideas?
 
Ok so it's not a hard drive problem, I took out the bootcamp drive and put it in an external enclosure and I can read files off it in OSX. I can't boot from it though (maybe because the USB connection is too slow? I get the flashing question mark/folder icon when I try to boot from it).

I put an older 2.5" drive that has been used in an external enclosure for storage in place of the bootcamp drive to see if it could be read. OSX still doesn't see it.

I'm thinking it has to be one of two things: either the sata cable is bad or the sata controller on the logic board is bad. I'm sure hoping it is the cable.

In system profiler under SATA device tree it has this:

NVidia MCP89 AHCI
NVidia MCP89 AHCI
OCZ-VERTEX2

So what it looks like is that the second SATA port can read my SSD but the first one cannot read my HDD. This leaves me to believe that it is the cable. Thoughts?
 
Swap the SSD with the HDD, see if it then can only read the HDD and not the SDD, if so then your cable is most likely damanged.

It is also possible that it needs a OSX boot rather then a bootcamp to successfully start up. But then again it is not even reading the hard drive, so I would check the connection by swapping hard drives.
 
accessoriesguy said:
Swap the SSD with the HDD, see if it then can only read the HDD and not the SDD, if so then your cable is most likely damanged.

It is also possible that it needs a OSX boot rather then a bootcamp to successfully start up. But then again it is not even reading the hard drive, so I would check the connection by swapping hard drives.
Click to expand...

Ok I tried that, and it couldn't read the SSD. So I put the SSD back where it was, in the optical drive space, and put the extra storage HDD back in where the original HDD goes. Booted up OSX, and now it can see the HDD...

So maybe the cable keeps going in and out whenever I move it around to replace the drive, and this time I got it in just the right place for it to work?
 
yup, the cable is just damaged or the connector may also be damaged, probably from the extreme heat or the bumping. The SSD side did not get the damage because SSD's do not emit as much heat. what model Macbook Pro do you have ? like 5,1

well at least thats the only problem and you already had an extra hard drive installed so you can keep using your computer. It sucks that it was damaged in such a way.
 
accessoriesguy said:
yup, the cable is just damaged or the connector may also be damaged, probably from the extreme heat or the bumping. The SSD side did not get the damage because SSD's do not emit as much heat. what model Macbook Pro do you have ? like 5,1

well at least thats the only problem and you already had an extra hard drive installed so you can keep using your computer. It sucks that it was damaged in such a way.
Click to expand...

It's a mid-2010 13" Unibody MBP (A1278) 2.66ghz C2D.

I ordered a new hard drive cable from ifixit, hopefully that will solve the problem.
 
it is hard to tell without checking it out, but you should start by replacing the cable first anyways. Hopefully that solves it, if not we know what that means, and hopefully you can live on just one hard drive, rather then replace the expensive board.
 
accessoriesguy said:
it is hard to tell without checking it out, but you should start by replacing the cable first anyways. Hopefully that solves it, if not we know what that means, and hopefully you can live on just one hard drive, rather then replace the expensive board.
Click to expand...

Yeah, if I have to I'll just buy a larger hard drive to replace my SSD. Not an ideal situation, but much cheaper than paying for a new logic board.

Crossing my fingers that the cable fixes it.
 
mrhat said:
Looks like it was just the cable. Swapped it out and I was good to go! Thanks for the help.
Click to expand...

nice, glad to help.

Was the damaged cable ripped or flimsy, do you notice anything odd about it?

It would be interesting to know how well these cables hold, or are they designed to give out to preserve the board. This reminds me of my sisters car, that with an over heat the air intake on that connected to the engine got fried. Just by touching it, it would rip off lol.
 
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