Hard drive not showing up in DU during OS install.

So a few weeks ago I woke up and tried to start up my Macbook (old model A1181, white, 1.83gHz) and all I got was a flashing folder on screen. I hopped on my old netbook and found a solution to the problem could be to re-install my OS. I have the install disk written onto a USB so I tried booting from that but keep getting stuck at the same point.



There is nothing showing up as a place to install the OS to. I opened DU and my hard drive isn't showing up on the list of devices; only my USB containing the start-up disc and my CD drive are appearing on the left column.



I'm fairly new to Macs, I got this one from a friend a month ago because she knew I wanted a new laptop and she hadn't touched this one in probably two years-ish. She said the last thing she did to it was install Snow Leopard. It worked perfect for two and a half weeks, no problems at all, powered down one night as usual and hasn't worked since.

Is it possible the harddrive is just toast? I want to fix it but I don't want to put money into it and have it still not work in the end.

Is it possible the harddrive is just toast? I want to fix it but I don't want to put money into it and have it still not work in the end.

Click to expand...

That's a rather old MacBook but with a new hard drive could probably be used to browse the net, email, and run some programs. Still has life left in it if all that's wrong with it is the bad hard drive. And yes, it appears the hard drive has failed. You can buy a SATA 2.5" notebook drive for it for less than $100 and if it doesn't work, return the hard drive. Make sure you have install disks for the machine before you attempt to do any work. Did she give you the Snow Leopard disk?

chscag said:

That's a rather old MacBook but with a new hard drive could probably be used to browse the net, email, and run some programs. Still has life left in it if all that's wrong with it is the bad hard drive. And yes, it appears the hard drive has failed. You can buy a SATA 2.5" notebook drive for it for less than $100 and if it doesn't work, return the hard drive. Make sure you have install disks for the machine before you attempt to do any work. Did she give you the Snow Leopard disk?

Click to expand...

Yeah I saw some drives online for about $60, was going to check out the couple computer shops in town and see if I can't find myself a 160GB one for cheap. I don't do much on the computer, and really I only want the Mac because I like how it looks so as long as I can get it running I'll be happy.

She didn't give me the disk, she gave me a USB copy of it; but it worked because it did come with Tiger and I managed to have SL on for about a week before it stopped working.

Well rummaged a hard drive out of a laptop that my mom had stashed away and it seems to have worked!