Macbook Pro is not recognizing the stock "Macintosh HD" drive?

shamelessidiot

I haven't dropped it or anything of the sort. Just stopped working last night when I was still using it. Everything stopped responding so I thought I'd give it a reboot. I did, then I was stuck with a flashing question mark folder. I got the internet recovery (Lion) and there is no internal disk showing up in Disk Utility. Any ideas? I plan on opening it up tomorrow just to check if the SATA is seated correctly.

I have it working now as I installed Lion onto an external hard drive, have a 2.5" enclosure and new 1TB HDD on the way as the current setup is not very practical nor useful, as you can imagine USB 2 is a lot slower than SATA III.


Also, if my HDD is alright I still plan on keeping the new drive, so if I clone the old drive onto the new one, do all my old settings and dock configuration etc. all clone over as well?

Zcott

Seems odd that it just stopped working completely. Is it a flash drive or a spinning one? Spinning ones normally click a lot encore giving up, and you'd encounter lots of freezes before they finally die.

I'd definitely open it up and check all the cables to the disk because that sounds odd.

shamelessidiot

Zcott wrote: »

Seems odd that it just stopped working completely. Is it a flash drive or a spinning one? Spinning ones normally click a lot encore giving up, and you'd encounter lots of freezes before they finally die.

I'd definitely open it up and check all the cables to the disk because that sounds odd.

Stock hard disk drive (spinning). I felt the same way. No issues at all previous to it. I took it apart, disconnected the drive and then reconnected just to make sure none of the connections were loose, but it all seems fine. Still no sign of it in Disk Utility though. My guess is that it's the data cable that may have stopped working somehow, so I ordered a new one on eBay. I have my fingers crossed it's not an issue with the logic board.

nialler

Pop the drive into an enclosure and see if it spins up and visible to the mac if not it's probably a failed drive (it happens). If you have data on it that's not backed up there's one thing that I try and generally been successful with, may sound a bit crazy but wrap it well in clingfilm, when I say well I mean really well and airtight, pop it into a sandwich bag and fire it into the freezer for 24 or so hours. Get a copy of disk warrior if you can install on working mac. Pop frozen drive into enclosure and quickly run disk warrior on it and see what you can recover, as I have said I've done this on about 10 drives over the years for clients and recovered 90 odd % of the data before they heat up to fail point again.

shamelessidiot

nialler wrote: »

Pop the drive into an enclosure and see if it spins up and visible to the mac if not it's probably a failed drive (it happens). If you have data on it that's not backed up there's one thing that I try and generally been successful with, may sound a bit crazy but wrap it well in clingfilm, when I say well I mean really well and airtight, pop it into a sandwich bag and fire it into the freezer for 24 or so hours. Get a copy of disk warrior if you can install on working mac. Pop frozen drive into enclosure and quickly run disk warrior on it and see what you can recover, as I have said I've done this on about 10 drives over the years for clients and recovered 90 odd % of the data before they heat up to fail point again.

Ordered one with the new HDD, should be here today. Will try that trick if it comes to it, cheers.

If the drive does end up being alright, if I clone the old drive onto the new one, will all of my Mac settings and stuff be back to the way they were or will I have to reconfigure? Should I just directly clone or a time machine back up d'ya reckon?

nialler

If the original drive is ok you have the ask the question why wasn't the mac recognising it could be a connector issue. But if it does mount and you've got the new drive installed you can carbon copy clone across or use time machine which takes more time.

shamelessidiot

nialler wrote: »

If the original drive is ok you have the ask the question why wasn't the mac recognising it could be a connector issue. But if it does mount and you've got the new drive installed you can carbon copy clone across or use time machine which takes more time.

Yup, you're definitely correct. Drive and enclosure arrived a while ago, the old drive that was in the Mac is now recognised in the enclosure whilst the brand new drive inside the machine is not recognised.

Thankfully I ordered this yesterday morning, so I shouldn't have to go through the ordeal for much longer.

Also: Just a note for anybody else with this issue in the future or whatever, don't forget about the screws in the hard disk, got me a little worried for a minute as I thought it wouldn't fit into the enclosure, but I just unscrewed them and then screwed them into the new drive. Normal Torx T6 bit is all you need.

shamelessidiot

New cable arrived today and after fiddling around for a little while, SUCCESS.

Now for cloning the old drive to the new one, do I just use the "restore" option in Disk Util. and use my old HDD as the Source and the new one as Destination?

nialler

I prefer using carbon copy cloner Shameless, it's free and it works every time. Think you get it from bombich.com

N

dnphoto

Hi guys, I have the same issue with my macbook, can you recommend what hard drive to get and what cable I might need. Thanks

shamelessidiot

dnphoto wrote: »

Hi guys, I have the same issue with my macbook, can you recommend what hard drive to get and what cable I might need. Thanks

Any 2.5" HDD will work, just make sure it's not a Western Digital Green, as they're not meant to be used as primary drives. I went with a standard 1TB Samsung drive. As with the cable, it'll depend on what exact model you have AFAIK.

dnphoto

Thanks for reply, I took out the hard drive and plugged it into another Mac using an internal hard drive port. I could access all my files. Does this mean the problem is the cable or something else?