Please Help, Mac Book Pro Not seeing new Hard Drive after Failure

[Teacher Todd]

Hey all, my mac book pro, 2009, froze on saturday. Shut it down restarted and had a flashing folder icon with a question mark. Put in snow leopard install disk and it booted but did not see a drive. Went to local mac service center and explained the problem. They felt as I did the hard drive was toast. Bought new western digital hard drive and took it home. Installed and put install disk in, still does not see anything in disk utility. Tried to look up disk in terminal and nothing. What could be wrong??

Thanks in advance, i have been searching the net for the last few hours and everything says to reformat, and I can not do that is it is not seeing the new drive. I have checked to make sure it is plugged in multiple times.

 

[ezramoore]

Check the disk in another machine or in an enclosure. Can you hear it spin up?

 

[chown33]

If you installed the new HD yourself, maybe you neglected to connect a cable. Or maybe you didn't insert the cable connector quite far enough.

 

[Teacher Todd]

Thanks, so I ordered an external hard enclosure and put my mac drive in it and booted up and is working great. Put the replacement drive in the enclosure and the mac is able to read it. Does this mean the cable is bad the connected my internal hdd?

Thanks

 

[24601]

I am having a similar issue right now. I swapped out the OEM drive for a Seagate Momentus LP. I can get the new drive to appear in Disk Utility... sometimes. I was able to partition and format as needed. But I couldn't get through an OS install without the disk "unmounting" or unseating. Eventually I couldn't get it to reappear in the utility at all.

I am able to see the old drive if I put it back in but because of its failure I can't do any of the utility actions.

I am returning the drive and getting a different brand hoping for a different outcome. But if there is another reason the drive won't appear I'd love some other opinions.

 

[ezramoore]

Does this mean the cable is bad the connected my internal hdd?

It's possible. The other possibilities are that the other end of that cable has become detached from the logic board, or that the HDD controller on the logic board has failed.

I take it that you are out of warranty but if you are within your warranty period, take it back to Apple.

If you are, indeed, out of warranty, then I would open the machine up and visually inspect the HDD > logic board cable and ensure that is it plugged in and seated correctly.

 

[spacedrabbit]

I would say the HDD/IR/Sleep flex cable may be suspect. Try replacing that next after you've re-seated the HDD cable to the HDD and to the logic board.

It is unlikely that the new drive is bad and that the logic board is the culprit since i believe drives have moved HDD controllers onto the drives themselves.

 

[ezramoore]

I would say the HDD/IR/Sleep flex cable may be suspect. Try replacing that next after you've re-seated the HDD cable to the HDD and to the logic board.

I didn't think the unibody HDD cable combined the IR/Sleep functions. The HDD is at least partially controlled on the drive, but the SATA bus has some logic to it that can fail.