Hello. I have a mid-2009 13" Macbook Pro. I was using it at home a couple weeks ago and when finished I powered it down and carried it back up stairs. A couple of days later, I powered it on only to find the flashing folder with a question mark.
I had replaced the original 160GB hard drive with a Samsung 830 256MB SSD last summer. Booting from a Mountain Lion bootable usb drive I created with Lion Diskmaker 2.0.2 I found that the drive was not even showing up in the system. Thinking the drive may have died, I pulled it and hooked it up to my PC via an external USB adapter. All the data is still intact and I am able to read and write from the drive.
I have since tried two different drives in the Mac. The first was a 750GB that I pulled from my daughters 2012 Macbook pro last summer. Had never even booted it up. I threw that in just to see if it would boot the existing operating system. It did not. Just the spinning white loading symbol for hours. I tried to boot to my ML usb drive and install a clean copy of ML but kept getting errors that the drive was locked. Couldn't erase anything or delete the existing partitions. Connected it to my PC and deleted the partitions with EaseUS partition manager, reinstalled the drive, and got the same error.
Next I reinstalled the original 160GB drive that came with the laptop. It was formatted as a single FAT32 partition. Again the Mac would not recognize it in disk utility or the installer. Hooked it back to my pc and deleted the partitions again but still nothing.
Just wondering if anyone could recommend a next step? Obviously the drives are not bad because they work externally, and the 750GB was at least recognized by the Mac so I doubt the controller or cable are bad. Any advice is greatly appreciated.
Sorry for the long post. Realize it will be TLR for a lot of people but I wanted to include as much information as possible so nobody has to ask these questions.
I had replaced the original 160GB hard drive with a Samsung 830 256MB SSD last summer. Booting from a Mountain Lion bootable usb drive I created with Lion Diskmaker 2.0.2 I found that the drive was not even showing up in the system. Thinking the drive may have died, I pulled it and hooked it up to my PC via an external USB adapter. All the data is still intact and I am able to read and write from the drive.
I have since tried two different drives in the Mac. The first was a 750GB that I pulled from my daughters 2012 Macbook pro last summer. Had never even booted it up. I threw that in just to see if it would boot the existing operating system. It did not. Just the spinning white loading symbol for hours. I tried to boot to my ML usb drive and install a clean copy of ML but kept getting errors that the drive was locked. Couldn't erase anything or delete the existing partitions. Connected it to my PC and deleted the partitions with EaseUS partition manager, reinstalled the drive, and got the same error.
Next I reinstalled the original 160GB drive that came with the laptop. It was formatted as a single FAT32 partition. Again the Mac would not recognize it in disk utility or the installer. Hooked it back to my pc and deleted the partitions again but still nothing.
Just wondering if anyone could recommend a next step? Obviously the drives are not bad because they work externally, and the 750GB was at least recognized by the Mac so I doubt the controller or cable are bad. Any advice is greatly appreciated.
Sorry for the long post. Realize it will be TLR for a lot of people but I wanted to include as much information as possible so nobody has to ask these questions.