Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

mkozlov

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 24, 2014
3
0
My friend bought a 2010 Macbook Pro (9,2) from someone and asked me to wipe it clean for her. It was working fine but it was noticeably slow. I proceeded to clear the PRAM by holding command + option + P + R while booting. Mac restarted as expected, so far so good.

I then booted into recovery mode by holding command + R. I opened Disk Utility and formatted the drive. It went smoothly, I would say it took 30 seconds. Then I went to install OSX Lion (the current OS on the MPB) and it asked me to connect to wifi. I did and it estimated 43 minutes until completion. After about 15 minutes I got an error saying it was unable to get all the contents for OSX Lion.

At this point it obviously wouldn't boot off the HDD because I had formatted it and the install of Lion failed. I reformatted it one more time and tried to install Lion again. It failed again with the same message. It was at this point that the HDD started to fail.

I rebooted into recovery and the drive was not present in disk utility. I rebooted once more and the drive had appeared, however this time and every time since then it would fail to format the drive. It would get stuck at 50%. I waited for a while and eventually did a forced shutdown. Can this damage a hard drive? I tried over and over again to get the drive formatted with no luck.

I had a bootable USB lying around with Mavericks on it that was created with Unibeast. I tried installing off the USB and it failed after a period of time.

Then I took the HDD out of the MPB and stuck it into my main rig (hackintosh). When I booted up it took longer than usual (30 seconds) to get past the AHCI screen where the computer detects the drives. I did this in order to determine whether it was a faulty HDD cable in the MPB that was causing intermittent problems.

It appears to me that the HDD is toast. However it was running fine until I tried to format it. Any ideas on what to try?

TL;DR Tried clean install of Lion and HDD hangs at 50% when formatting.
 
Your HDD was almost certainly starting to fail before the format, it was probably why her machine was running slow before you touched it.
 
the hard drive is definitely failing

if you have a windows computer, try downloading HD Sentinel pro and check the health of the hard drive.

Best replace the hard drive and reinstall.

a 2010 macbook can support mavericks and yosemite.
 
I used a tool called DriveDx. I don't know how accurate this software is but it reported like 1836 bad sectors!!!
 
As others stated, the drive is toast, and the formatting didn't kill the computer, but the other way around. The failing drive crashed the computer.

At least its a repair that is not costly and can be done by you instead of an apple tech.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.