11-03-2009, 10:49 AM

Hi,

I've got a macbook pro (About 10 days old) that I have put a Seagate 7200 rpm 500GB drive in. This drive has worked well since day one, until yesterday.

I went to restart the computer yesterday, and it got to the point where it should be restarting and then it just stopped. No startup chime, nothing onscreen.

I attemped to "reset the pram" and the SMC, without any noticeable affect. (Assuming I was doing it right... I didn't see any indication of anything happening.)

But - when I take out the hard disk (Basically just unplug it and replug it back in), the computer will start once again.

Same thing this morning, except the computer was only insuspend (lid closed) last night. Wouldn't boot this morning until I unplugged/plugged in the hard disk.

Im new to Macs, but in the PC world I would assume drive failure.. Though certainly not common to fail so bad the computer does not start.

Is there anything else I should try before I assume the drive is dead? For what its worth, the problem thus far is difficult to reproduce but I assume it will happen again.

Thanks

11-03-2009, 11:18 AM

There's really no hw difference between a mac and a pc. Personally, if you can boot reliably on the original hdd... I'd get a replacement for the seagate under warranty, toss it in a chassis and attempt to recover all data off it (superduper would work great for this) and go that route.

The only other thing I can think of is resetting nvram/pram.. which on the intel should just be booting holding cmd-option p and r.