Macbook Pro hard drive issue

[gunslinger]

I have a late 2009 Macbook Pro giving me fits. The problem: Customer brings it in saying it wont boot. He tries to boot it in front of me and all we get is the apple logo for several mins. He said he has left it that way over night and nothing. After making sure he has nothing to back up I went to repair the disk. No go, it told me the drive would not unmount. So I decide to nuke and pave. It would not let me install snow leopard. I got an error saying could not allocate the memory? I take the hard drive out and try connecting it via USB to another system and it said disk not recognized. At this point I felt the drive must be bad and got a new one. I installed the drive and tried to boot into disk utility to format it. The drive was not seen at all by disk utility.

On the advice of a fellow tech I installed snow leopard on this new drive via my Mac and USB cable. I then installed the drive into the customers Mac and again disk utility only sees the DVD drive and disc but not the HDD.

Can someone please help I'm getting ready to pull my hair out over this one.

 

[Avgsmoe]

If you have a Mac you can verify the hdd on your Mac....

Run memtest. If that passes, boot an offline OS with stress testing, I use ubcd4win and prime95.

 

[gunslinger]

If you have a Mac you can verify the hdd on your Mac....

Run memtest. If that passes, boot an offline OS with stress testing, I use ubcd4win and prime95.

Ok, here is what I did after posting this: Removed the HDD and hooked it up via USB to another Mac. Not only does it see it but it will boot from it. I cannot access the built in hardware test on the customer machine. I tried holding the "d" key on boot and all I get is a blinking folder with a "?"

 

[anonymous Mac Tech]

Check the SATA cable connection to the logic board. They are really delicate connections and it may look seated but it could have easily came loose.

 

[gunslinger]

Check the SATA cable connection to the logic board. They are really delicate connections and it may look seated but it could have easily came loose.

Checked that. Removed the drive and connected it to my Windows machine. Formatted in NTFS. Now the Mac sees the drive but I get the error: "POSIX reports: Cannot allocate memory" when I try to use dick utility to partition it.

 

[gunslinger]

Update: I'm now getting an input/output error.

 

[anonymous Mac Tech]

Checked that. Removed the drive and connected it to my Windows machine. Formatted in NTFS. Now the Mac sees the drive but I get the error: "POSIX reports: Cannot allocate memory" when I try to use dick utility to partition it.

If you have a USB SATA dock/enclosure, put the drive in that and connect it to the MBP. Then boot to the installer and go to disk utility and see what happens. I'm wondering if its actually the HD controller on the board.

 

[gunslinger]

If you have a USB SATA dock/enclosure, put the drive in that and connect it to the MBP. Then boot to the installer and go to disk utility and see what happens. I'm wondering if its actually the HD controller on the board.

Just tried that, worked like a charm. Seen the disk and formatted it. So I guess that means a bad Logic board?

 

[anonymous Mac Tech]

Just tried that, worked like a charm. Seen the disk and formatted it. So I guess that means a bad Logic board?

Either that or the SATA cable itself. I actually seen one or two issues on these unibodies with the actual controller going bad and not any cables yet. Those cables are paper thin. I haven't personally seen any of those cables turn out to be bad, but its worth a try.

 

[gunslinger]

Going to see if I can get a cable. Priced some logic boards and I'm still in shock. If its not the cable the system is ebay material.

 

[anonymous Mac Tech]

Going to see if I can get a cable. Priced some logic boards and I'm still in shock. If its not the cable the system is ebay material.

The best bet for a logic board replacement is actually the Apple Store or an Apple authorized shop. For instance, if I do an out of warranty logic board replacement, its much cheaper to just ship to Apples repair depot. If I ordered the board directly from Apple, our cost would still be double what a mail in repair would cost. Just another way Apple likes to centralize everything, even with authorized shops. So I usually do in-house logic board replacements as long as the machine is covered, but the out of warranty ones I have to send off or else it would cost the customer twice as much. A very good ball park estimate on that machine would be about $300-$400 for a mail in.

 

[gunslinger]

Thanks anonymous Mac Tech, you saved me some leg work. I'll give the guy a quote but I'm pretty sure he wont want to do it.