Replace Fried harddrive. What the EFi do I do?

[heyadrian]

Hi,

It appears that my brand-new MBP 2011 i7 has a cookd harddrive, but never mind, I've got a 256MB SSD I wanted to shove in it anyway.

My question is, what do I do if the old drive isn't readable? What do I do about the EFI etc?

Or do I just shove the unit in and install as normal?

Cheers

Ade

 

[res1233]

The EFI is contained on a chip on the motherboard. Don't worry about it. Just replace the drive and restore as normal.

 

[heyadrian]

Thats something I wasn't hoping to hear either!

This all came about thanks to a botched EFI update (the Thunderbolt one) which decided to commit suicide half-way through it's update :-\

 

[res1233]

Thats something I wasn't hoping to hear either!

This all came about thanks to a botched EFI update (the Thunderbolt one) which decided to commit suicide half-way through it's update :-\

If the update to your firmware was interrupted, your computer will beep 9 times when restarting (3 short, 3 long, 3 short) and the screen will be black. Your computer will attempt to recover by itself. It can take up to 30 seconds for your computer to restore the EFI Firmware to the previous version. Do not unplug your computer during this process. Your computer will restart by itself when the EFI Firmware is restored.

Is this not happening?

 

[cinematicme]

Is this not happening?

I'm with this user, the EFI will recover itself in the event of a botch, though I honestly can't recall ever coming across an EFI firmware update frying anything (personally).

 

[heyadrian]

weird as it was running perfectly until that thunderbolt/efi update.

I'm not a light user either, I was grilling it using 3D Viz pretty much 10 hours a day with high renders.

Odd thing is Windows 7 64 seems to run fine on it (on the original HD), thats whats boggling me!

2 separate sets of install media (both from the same model) dont like it, yet windows does? If anything, I would have thought windows would have had a heart attack and collapsed first.

I did notice though that the DU in the installer makes no mention of the EFI partitions etc...

Is it worth nuking the LOT and trying an install like that? (Ideally I wanted this SSD unit for my presentation craptop)

 

[cinematicme]

weird as it was running perfectly until that thunderbolt/efi update.

I'm not a light user either, I was grilling it using 3D Viz pretty much 10 hours a day with high renders.

Odd thing is Windows 7 64 seems to run fine on it (on the original HD), thats whats boggling me!

2 separate sets of install media (both from the same model) dont like it, yet windows does? If anything, I would have thought windows would have had a heart attack and collapsed first.

I did notice though that the DU in the installer makes no mention of the EFI partitions etc...

Is it worth nuking the LOT and trying an install like that? (Ideally I wanted this SSD unit for my presentation craptop)

Does the volume pass SMART and integrity test? You might wanna try running a repair disk from bootable medium like the original OS discs or a Lion USB.

There is a possiblity that your EFI partition got overwrote....but thats a pretty slim chance

 

[heyadrian]

yup, SMART reports nothing... The endless install issues are from the original DVD (as well as another one Ive tried from my other halfs identical unit).

Ive tried multiple partition sizes, even a 10 artition setup lol.

Reset PRAM and NVRAM too.

DU is erratic. sometimes its ok after I create the ner parts, and other times it sais there's unused nodes (despite zeroing the parts too).

I have run various (bootable) HD checking tools on the unit and nothing reports issues

 

[heyadrian]

Looks like the Harddrive wasnt cooked after all. I think that it had something to do with that EFI partition.

What I did was literally scrap the disk partitions (all three)using a third party disk manager, booted back off te OSX Install DVD, made the partitions using DU, installed, fixed.

Its a little annoying that was the only way about it... EFI Updates DONT only happen on-board, but they also write various info to the harddrive. Namely the EFI partition.

I guess thats where it went wrong...