Failed Hard Drive, Possibly Optical Drive Too, Need Some Help

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Hello,
I recently acquired a MacBook (the plastic white kind) from a friend who had his way with it and now want me to resurrect it. The MacBook had the flashing folder with a question mark on boot. I reset the PRAM and NVRAM and still nothing. Took out the Hard Drive and upon further testing figured out that it is legitimately permaf***ed. So I have an extra SATA 2.5" drive that I was going to replace it with, and then I was going to order the Recovery CD for it, but my friend mentioned that the optical drive had not been reading disks. So before I order those I want to figure out if the drive is working. I was going to use some kind of bootable CD to test the drive. But I wasn't sure about a few things.

Can I burn an ISO of a Linux Live cd in a Windows Environment and boot it with a MacBook? (I was thinking like **** Small Linux)

Is there an easier way to test the optical drive?

Can I replace the MacBook Hard Drive with any 2.5" SATA Drive?

Can this plastic piece of junk run the new Mac OS X?

Why can't we all get along?
 

chscag

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Your Mac's Specs
2017 27" iMac, 10.5" iPad Pro, iPhone 8, iPhone 11, iPhone 12 Mini, Numerous iPods, Monterey
You can try booting the machine with any Linux live CD. That will also test the optical drive. The 2.5" SATA hard drive should work.

As far as the machine being able to run the latest OS X, it depends on which model it is. Find which model number it is and then access the Apple KB or ask here.

Regards.
 
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Thanks For the Reply,
Well I Just Burned an image of DSL on my Vista Machine and tried to boot the MacBook while holding the "C" Key. The Thing made an attempt to spin up the disk and then made some funny noises which could be normal or not. But either way it didn't boot, and still shows me the flashing folder question mark. I'm going to try another live cd to make sure. But it looks like I'm going to have to ebay me an optical drive.

The Model Number is : A1181

Thanks Again.
 
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SOOOO, tried to boot with SLAX still nothing. Tried to do the power reset thing too where you take the battery out and hold the power button, and then plug it in. Still doesn't want to read the disk. The drive takes the disk, spins it up for a few seconds, makes some clicking noises, then ejects.
After looking around on ebay I couldn't really find an optical drive for the specific model for less then $120!! SO now the question becomes:

Are there any other tricks to get the optical drive to start reading disks again?

Are there any good places to find a cheap ($50 or less) replacement optical drive for a MacBook A1181?
 
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Your Mac's Specs
MBP 13" mid 2010, 2.4GHz, 8GB RAM, 120GB SSD
The model in my A1181 is UJ-857, try ebaying the model number.
 

chscag

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No problem running Leopard on that machine if you can get an optical drive replacement on eBay. You really need an internal drive to install the operating system and bring things back up to speed.

Later on after Leopard has been installed, you can add an external DVD 2X burner including Lightscribe for less than $75.00. It's the Apple original internal drive that's costly.

Regards.
 
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Thanks for posting the model number of the drive. I thought that's what I needed to find the right one on ebay. Anyways, I still couldn't find one for less then $110 in the states (must be the advanced slot loading technology.) But I did find a couple of refurbished ones from Hong Kong for around $80. I have ordered parts from there before with no problems. The auctioneers request that you check whether or not you have a 9.5mm (height) drive. So to make sure I'm going to open this baby up and see what we got inside, maybe I'll have a different model number to look for on ebay. Either way I'm selling my old ipod to pay for the parts.

Here are a couple links to ebay auctions for replacement drive coming from Hong Kong, Anyone see any problems that could arise??

The latter is not a UJ-857, but a GWA-4080MA. The auction says its is still compatible.

http://cgi.ebay.com/Apple-MacBook-Pro-DVD-superdrive-UJ-857-C-13-15-17_W0QQitemZ170294441084QQcmdZViewItemQQptZApple_Drives_and_Media?hash=item170294441084&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=66%3A2|65%3A15|39%3A1|240%3A1318


http://cgi.ebay.com/Apple-MacBook-Pro-HLG-Superdrive-DVD-drive-GWA-4080MA_W0QQitemZ170293949012QQcmdZViewItemQQptZApple_Drives_and_Media?hash=item170293949012&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=66%3A2|65%3A15|39%3A1|240%3A1318
 

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