12-29-2010, 01:22 PM

So about a week ago my Macbook Pro 13 inch (OSX 10.6.5) (Mid 2010) started making a grinding noise inside. It wasn't the sound of the fan and based on the noise my best guess is the hard drive discs are hitting or rubbing against something.
I decided to restore my mac to factory settings, after backing up to time machine, and followed the instructions after inserting the Snow Leopard install disk. It had an estimated time of just over an hour.
After 20 minutes my mac restarted itself and was on the grey startup screen for about 10 minutes when a different color grey screen came on asking me to restart my mac manually.
That was at 7:30pm. Before I knew it, it was 10:30. Almost every 5 minutes my mac asked me to restart it manually and it never got past the grey start-up screen with the apple logo. I shut it down for the night and started it again this morning and after 5 minutes it asked me to restart again.
Is my hard drive fried?

12-29-2010, 01:46 PM

When you say you shut it down over-night and started again in the morning, how do you mean start again? Do you mean you started from the beginning boot from the DVD or just turned it on?

- Simon

12-29-2010, 02:02 PM

What you're seeing are "kernel panics". That's a pretty good indication that your hard drive has probably failed. That kind of goes along with the grinding sound you heard. Hopefully, you made a backup prior to doing the reinstall?

In any event, it appears you need a new hard drive. Boot your machine with the install DVD and run a verify and repair. Let's see what it says.