OS not installing

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A few days ago a friend of mine gave me her 13 in Macbook Pro to replace a harddrive in. I have the new harddrive put in the machine, however when I boot up with the OS disc it doesn't recognize the harddrive. I noticed that the disc I have is a v10.6 disc and what shipped with the computer is a v 10.5 disc. Would that cause the issue? Do you think the new harddrive is bad/ is there a bad connection? I'm out of ideas so I'm turning to here. If anyone has any advice to offer whatsoever let me know.
 

Raz0rEdge

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What color is the disc you have? If it's gray, it's machine specific and you need to get the disc that came with that MBP to install Leopard (10.5) back onto it. You shouldn't be using your disc to install anything on there since that machine isn't yours and the EULA only allows you to install OS X on machine that is under your control and in your household..
 

vansmith

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Are you sure the hard drive is connected properly? If the drive isn't set properly, there's no way for the OS to know that a drive is connected. The next thing to check would be the operation of the disk itself using something like an external case.
 
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So what I'm understanding is it could be the disc? If I have the wrong disc the harddrive actually wouldn't show up in the disk utilities for me to format it?
 

Raz0rEdge

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No, the wrong disc might not even boot up, but if it does boot up it wouldn't prevent access to the HD. If you don't see the HD at all, as Van said, check the cable connections..
 
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Okay, I know the haddrive is connected correctly and from what I can tell the cable from the harddrive to the board is connect and won't budge. Am I missing something? Kind of new to the repairing of Macs as you can see.
 

pigoo3

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A few days ago a friend of mine gave me her 13 in Macbook Pro to replace a harddrive in. I have the new harddrive put in the machine, however when I boot up with the OS disc it doesn't recognize the harddrive. I noticed that the disc I have is a v10.6 disc and what shipped with the computer is a v 10.5 disc. Would that cause the issue? Do you think the new harddrive is bad/ is there a bad connection? I'm out of ideas so I'm turning to here. If anyone has any advice to offer whatsoever let me know.

Have you formatted the new hard drive to be compatible with the Macintosh OS?

- Nick
 
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I have not, every tutorial I saw/followed online was telling me I could format the drive once I got into the disc utility.
 

chscag

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If the new hard drive is not seen at all you can't format it. It's possible the SATA cable from the drive to the logic board is bad. The SATA cable is a ribbon type which is famous for drying out from the heat and breaking internally. When you removed the old hard drive that may have been when the cable broke. (if it's broken) Try replacing the cable with a new one. Check iFixit: The free repair manual for a replacement or Mac Repair - Mac Parts and Service for Apple Macbook, iPhone, iPad.
 
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Okay well I'm going to try the harddrive with an external casing as see if it's at least recognized if it's not then I'll know. But what would you guys recommend is a good price to sell this laptop for if it's in this state of not working? What if it is working?
 

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