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Very stange issue.... Getting SBBOD on a MACbook Pro that never recovers!

D

dave-sky

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 10, 2011
4
0
I am trying to help out a friend with their older MACbook Pro. It was loaded with 10.6 (Snow Leopard), and it appeared to get the Spinning Beachball of Death (SBBOD) within a few minutes of startup and never stops, locking the unit up so the only way to recover is to reboot. Thinking that there was an app causing the issue, I ran the Activity Monitor and nothing showed up as being out of the norm.

Then, I acquired the Snow Leopard and disk and did a fresh install... same thing. My first inclination was the hard drive.... replaced that, and did another fresh install with the same issue. In fact, I cannot even do the updates on the 10.6 to 10.6.6 so that I can move to Lion. Oh, it downloads the software correctly from Apple, but the restart locks it up again.

It has 4Gig... so, my next idea here is thinking that maybe one of the RAM modules went bad... I put only one it at time and got the same results. I am at a complete loss on which way to go here. Could this be time for the graveyard for this unit?

Any and all responses on something to try here would be greatly appreciate. Thanks in advance. By the way, this is a unit with the Intel 2.53 Ghz Core 2 Duo with 4GB 1067 Mhz DDR3.

Regards,
Dave
 
Audit13 said:
Possible defective hard drive cable? Could be of its a 2009 to 2012 unit.
Click to expand...


I would think that to be possible if it happened at various times and not always, but this seems to have the issue almost consistently after 2 minutes of reboot or, when you try to do a reboot from the Apple prompt.
 
With a 2010 I had, the internal drive would sometimes boot but not always. Even when trying to reinstall, the drive could be erased but not partitioned and vice versa. There was never any consistency. After changing the cable, I didn't have any problems with erasing, partitioning, and booting.
 
If the hard drive is removable, replace it with an SSD.

What year is the MacBook in question?
What size is the screen?
 
My friend has the same laptop. Sometimes, it would take five or six tries before the machine would boot from the internal hard drive. He also had problems erasing and partitioning until he changed his drive cable; however, he did not mention the beach ball effect.

I still recommend changing the drive cable as it seems to be a common problem with 2009 to 2012 Macbooks.
 
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