Help, I'm tired of this thing!

So I bought my macbook in June or so of 2006. It worked amazing up until this May. In May of this year, safari froze and the whole laptop froze and I rebooted it, on bootup the hard drive died and did the whole question mark on a folder thing and I lost most of the important things I had that I didn't back up.

I called apple, but of course my macbook was no longer under warranty, and they told me I had to pay them to talk to them. From then on I basically replaced the hard drive on my own, and I was back up and running. This was around June that I finally got it back up and running. Besides the screen flickering (which had been going on since before the hd replacement) constantly, the tens of minutes of waiting for the thing to boot up, the random shut offs, the large amount of staining on the keyboard, and the laptop not being able to function below around 30% battery most of the time, things were good.

Funny enough, after telling my friend about how great overall the laptop has been in the past few weeks, hours later, at about 1030am this morning I'd say, it did the EXACT same thing again. Safari started to run slow as heck, then the whole computer froze, and yet again a folder with a question mark. But different from last time, the second time i booted it up after the folder thing, the screen doesnt even turn on and theres a grinding(for lack of a better term) sound from the inside from time to time.

Now obviously I'm mad haha. So I'm sorry that I may sound angry or something but does anyone have anything that may solve this or I dont know. I have a hunch that it hasnt been the hd itself but maybe a motherboard or power issue. I always noted that my macbook got heated a little more than others ive used/seen.

TL; DR: Macbook died twice now, help.

doesn't sound like corrupt hard drives, more like disk format errors.

How often do you run disk Utility or other maintenance apps and how much free space to you usually have on your drive?

Yeah, the first time it happened, the hard drive would make wierd noises all over the place when I started it, this time everything sounds normal. Not sure about disk utilities, I would guess not that much then hah. But when it went down this time, first time i had maybe 20g left, second time I had 80gb left.

marker0045 said:

I have a hunch that it hasnt been the hd itself but maybe a motherboard or power issue.

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I doubt very much that grinding sounds are caused by a problem with the logic board or power supply. If it's definitely a mechanical sound, then it must be something mechanical. If it's not a fan rubbing against something, the only other mechanical thing is your HDD. It sounds like lightning struck you twice.

BTW, after the first failure I hope you learned that it's a very good idea to frequently back up your data.

I think you need to back up your files, reformat and re-install OS X

If you run utilities like ONyX or MainMenu then your mac should stay nice and healthy

A mechanical problem. Run Disk Utility and do a little clean up.

Yes, I definately learned to back up my files and this time they were. Now its just a complete inconvience since im a student.

I would reinstall osx and everything but the problem this time is the screen is just blank/black everything sounds the same on start-up but no screen and the white light on the side just stays white.

Looks to me like you're the victim of a broken or fried monitor. I've heard that's happened to Mac's a lot in the past. I'm not quite sure what to do about that if you don't have the warranty. You're only option may be to shell out money to Apple and have it fixed.

Alright, so I sat down and took the keyboard off just to have a look and there was a plug on the top left that was unplugged, plugged it in and the monitor worked(obviously still coming up with the folder icon). And im pretty sure that it is in fact the hard drive, when i start it up the screen flickers like its starting up but the hd doesnt make that initial noise anymore, it just starts clicking and the screen stays black. Any ideas? I guess im going to get a new hd from WD since it is still under warranty, but my question really is, is it my macbook that keeps killing the drives or am I just lucky enough to get two failures?

edit: I also found one of those warranty seals ( i think) between the cd-rom and the fan and it was broken, and this is the first time i've looked inside the thing and it has never been worked on by anyone, kind of strange.

Because of the fact that Apple does not manufacture the hard drive in your MacBook, it could be that you just got a defective one. Obviously you've backed it up by now, if not I would highly recommend it. Then, purchase a new HD.

Did you get a warranty with your new hard drive? If so claim a new one on that.

You Mac hasn't failed twice. Your hard drive has. Why blame Apple for this? Why not blame your hard drive manufacturer?

Model of the HDD and brand please?

homer_j said:

Did you get a warranty with your new hard drive? If so claim a new one on that.

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Yes, I plan to. My question earlier though is that am I really lucky that I had two (one from apple and one from western digital) hard drives fail in the same machine or there something wrong with my macbook.

You Mac hasn't failed twice. Your hard drive has. Why blame Apple for this? Why not blame your hard drive manufacturer?

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Same as above really, the first time it happened part of me thought "hey it happens" but two is kind of raising suspicions, thats all. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely LOVED this thing for the past 2 years up until all this stuff....although what do you qualify as "my mac"? the screen flickering non stop, the 10 minute startup time or the yellow on the keyboard?

Model of the HDD and brand please?

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The initial was a Seagate 60gb i believe and the second was a Western Digital 160gb, i dont have any item numbers right now as im in class.

Just thought that I would let you know that AFAIK the Applecare protection plan does not cover the Macbook Screen…

I agree with the others who said it's not really a problem with Apple's equipment. The grinding sounds you're hearing are from the HDD bearings rubbing. It's a common mechanical failure mode. There's nothing in the power supply or monitor or any other part of the machine that's causing it. It's simply the HDD.

As to why two of them have failed on you? It's either because:

(a) You're a very unlucky person
(b) You're shaking or dropping your Macbook, or handling it too roughly

My guess is that it's (b).

shahvikram123 said:

Just thought that I would let you know that AFAIK the Applecare protection plan does not cover the Macbook Screen…

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The flickering could be the screen or the graphic card. You won't know until they check that out.

As for the HDD I think it was just bad luck that they failed on you like that. I have HDD from like when I was 13 and it still works. ^-^"