03-02-2010, 04:19 PM

Hey guys

So for the last month or two my MacBook has been running slugglish, with full description in my thread about it here: Mac running sluggish - hard drive problem?

Anyway, two nights ago my Mac would not boot. I turn it on and it's stuck at the white screen. I tried holing down option during startup and nether of my partitions showed up so I'm 99.9% sure my Seagate Momentus 500GB @7200RPM drive is dead. I had approx. 180GB free on that drive. Then I tried booting from CD (SL disc) by holding down "C" and nothing happened. Is there some other button I have to hold?

I just wanna ask you guys if this is for the hard drive, and not possibly any other problem.

The only thing I can think of doin right now is to check if I still have warranty left on my drive (bought/installed it nine months ago), and if not then go buy a new drive. If I have to buy a new drive, I wanna do a fresh clean install of SL. Can I do this, and then use Migration Assistant to transfer most of my data back? I wanna do it this way rather than a restore because I figured I should not have sooo many apps and all that crap on my drive anyway. Also I've had several problems with the OS before (kernal panics, etc. had to reinstall OS twice now in the 1.5years I owned my Mac) so I don't wanna restore those potential problems again lol.

Luckily I have my stuff backed up.

03-02-2010, 05:01 PM

Good news about the Seagate. It's still under warranty. Contact them for a RMA. Seagate contacts.

In order to boot from your Snow Leopard DVD, hold down the "Option" key as soon as you hear the POST chime. That should bring it up on the screen.

Once the machine boots, escape out of the install process and select "Utilities" "Disk Utilities" from the top menu. Click the First Aid tab and do a verify and repair of the hard drive. If it won't recognize the hard drive, that's a good indication it may have died. Since you have a backup, you don't need to worry about getting your data from the drive.

You might also want to run the Apple Hardware Test when booted from the DVD. See the following KB article from Apple. LINK

Regards.

03-02-2010, 05:20 PM

Ok thanks a lot for that info!! One problem though: When holding down "option", the CD doesn't come up, which is what I'm worried about. I'm gonna try it again right now, maybe I just didn't wait long enought the first time for the screen to change.

03-02-2010, 05:21 PM

Just tried it. All I get is a cursor, and a loud noise coming from the CD spinning in the drive. That's it. And then it stops spinning after a little while :/

EDIT: I also don't know how to get it out

03-02-2010, 06:52 PM

That sounds like a problem on the board. Probably the drive controller. If the computer is still under warranty, call Apple.

03-02-2010, 07:27 PM

Originally Posted by Jamie-Jamie

That sounds like a problem on the board. Probably the drive controller. If the computer is still under warranty, call Apple.

Yeah, it's not under Apple's warranty anymore. I'll probably take it to another Apple-specialist shop sometime soon. I was afraid of it being something like the drive controller. But while my hard drive was functioning like crap for the past two months, my CD ROM was fine...