12-12-2009, 02:59 PM

OK, so I dropped my macbook (from 6ft, not 20ft), it's a late 2008 unibody thingy (I'm not an expert).

There's no real physical damage to the machine other that a bit of a ding but what I do have a problem with is it not booting on the Mac side of things, i get to the grey screen with the apple and the spinny thing and that's about it. However, I am able to boot up the windows side of the machine tho it does seem to BSOD regularly.

From what I've read, I'm guessing that the hard drive is toast (for the most part anyway), does this sound right?

If this is the case, it's a great excuse to pop a bigger HDD in, what should I be looking at here, is there such a thing as a mac specific HDD or can I just order a normal 2.5 HDD off amazon (i notice that the one on my mac has four little silver lugs to locate it!).

Also, I no longer have my Mac installation discs (got destroyed in a hurricane last year), but I do have my snow leopard upgrade. The computer is registered with apple so it's totally legit, how can I go about getting the software back on the machine? Borrow someone elses disc if i can find one?

Please help, I'm on a small Island in the Caribbean and don't have access to Apple stores and the like.

Thanks in advance

Ian

12-12-2009, 08:41 PM

The hard drive has probably been damaged from the drop - as you suspect. As far as your original installation disks are concerned, you can purchase replacements from Apple for a small fee. You should be able to reinstall OS X Snow Leopard from the SL DVD and run Boot Camp again to install Windows.

There is no such thing as a Mac specific hard drive so you can order one from Amazon if you like. Just make sure it's a 2.5" SATA drive. Can be either 5400 RPM or 7200 RPM.

Regards.

12-13-2009, 10:18 AM

That's great, thanks for the info!