New Hard Drive Not Showing Up in Disk Utilities

[quimberton]

Hi all,

So a few days ago my hard drive failed on me completely. And I didn't back up.

Yeah.

Thus today I bought a WD Scorpio Blue SATA 320 GB / 8 MB Cache / 5400 RPM internal hard drive and installed it myself in my 13" MacBook Pro (2009 I think). Model number of the HD is WDBABC3200ANC-NRSN.

After installing the hard drive, I turned on the laptop and put my Snow Leopard install disc into the computer. It took me to the Mac OS X installer and I went into Utilities / Disk Utilities.

Here, however, my new hard drive isn't showing up at all. Not under system diagnostics, or start-up disk. Nowhere!

What do I need to do to make this laptop recognize it has a new hard drive? I'm pretty sure I installed the hard drive correctly. Any thoughts?


Thanks a ton! ^_^

 

[Detrius]

Are you sure your old hard drive was bad? You might have a bad hard drive cable.

 

[quimberton]

Here's an update: I opened the Macbook up again and made sure all the connections to the hard drive were correct. After that, the computer was able to finally see the hard drive. So I installed Snow Leopard and the applications disc and everything seemed to be running smoothly. Sure enough, I went to plug in head phones, and the computer froze on me. I turned it off by holding the power button down, and when I turned it back on again, I got the same thing from before: a blinking question mark file and when I attempted to do an alt/option start up, no hard drive was found.

This morning I turned the computer on and everything worked well. Then when I tried to do a software update, the damn thing froze on me AGAIN.

What do you think could be causing this? Is is just a bad hard drive connector, or a logic board issue? Something smaller?

And yes, I made sure to double check the first hard drive. I took it to 2 different professionals and they both told me it's completely failed.

 

[harcosparky]

You plugged in headphones, and next thing is computer completely non-responsive?

Does not sound like a hard drive cable to me, unless the headphones initiated a call for the HDD and it could not function because of that cable.

Do you have an EXTERNAL enclosure you can use to put one of the drives in?

Can you boot off the optical drive?

If yes to both, I would hook up an external drive boot off the optical drive with the OSX disk then proceed to install OSX to the external drive.

Once installed shut down and boot off the external HDD.

It's a bit of work, but if it works that way then clearly the problem is internal and may well be that cable.

We actually have OSX installed on an external HDD for each of our computers incase of an internal drive failure.