Out of ideas - any suggestion on a HDD failure?

[kkristian]

Hi everybody,

if you'll take your time reading this, i'll be so grateful!

My MBP 13" (mid 2010) crashed. I figured out it was the HDD since I got the flashing Finder folder with the question mark in it.

I bought a HD+SSD hybrid drive (Momentus XT 500gb) and replaced it with the old, crashed one.

Right. All good.

I made a bootable external hard drive with OS X Mountain Lion on it (borrowed another friends mac) - and I know I did this thing absolutely right. So..

I booted my crashed MPB holding the option bottom down. I connected to WiFi and went into Disc Utility. Here comes the problem!!


I can't see the new HD+SSD drive. What could cause that issue??

- and yes, i did check that the SATA-cable was placed correctly

 

[DewGuy1999]

I'm a little confused by your explanation, are you booting from the external hard drive with Mountain Lion on it? Have you tried booting from your original system restore discs that came with your MacBook Pro?

 

[kkristian]

I'm a little confused by your explanation, are you booting from the external hard drive with Mountain Lion on it? Have you tried booting from your original system restore discs that came with your MacBook Pro?

I'm booting from the new ssd+hd i installed. I use the external hard drive as a bootable drive with mountain lion installer on it.
When I boot up from the new ssd+hd, hold option down, open up disc utility, it won't show the new drive. And it's not the format-part, that's wrong. I tried to install the new ssd+hd in another mac, and it showed up right away in disc utility (format being correct and so on). So perhaps the SATA-cable is the real problem in my crashed macbook?

 

[Fishrrman]

"So perhaps the SATA-cable is the real problem in my crashed macbook?"

Hmmm, that could be the problem.
A replacement cable probably isn't expensive, and is probably not hard to install.

You might check "ifixit.com" to find the right part number.

 

[DewGuy1999]

I'm booting from the new ssd+hd i installed. I use the external hard drive as a bootable drive with mountain lion installer on it.
When I boot up from the new ssd+hd, hold option down, open up disc utility, it won't show the new drive. And it's not the format-part, that's wrong. I tried to install the new ssd+hd in another mac, and it showed up right away in disc utility (format being correct and so on). So perhaps the SATA-cable is the real problem in my crashed macbook?

I've yet to install Lion or Mountain Lion on a clean hard drive so, I wasn't familiar as to how that works. Thanks for clarifying. I Googled a clean install of Mountain Lion and it sounds like you're doing everything right.

If you checked your connections and it's still not showing up in Disk Utility it could be the hard drive cable or worse the logic board. I'm guessing that your MacBook Pro isn't covered by AppleCare so you can't get Apple to take a look at it for free. If that's the case a new cable is probably worth a try.

FYI: The folder with a question mark doesn't necessarily mean that the hard drive failed, it means that the Mac can't find a bootable system, so if it is a bad cable your original hard drive might still be good.