Hard Disk Missing & No Recovery Partition

[YanAndrew]

Hi Guys,

I have a problem which I hope you Guys can give me some advise or guidance.

Basicall, I have an old MacBook (A1181) which was running Snow Leopard. It was under-used over the years so whilst it is old, it is still in good working order. It was only recently that I found a function for it, therefore I began focussing on it after many years of leaving it be. The second time I tried to boot it up to continue getting it updated, it was unable to boot. I had the white screen with flashing '?' folder. It's almost as if the entire hard disk just went missing. After attempting many troubleshooting I found online, nothing worked. I had wanted to upgrade the OS from Snow Leopard to Lion (10.7.5), but even First Aid, Erase, Partition, Restore were all unavailable on disk utility. The only way I could boot it up is by using a Lion bootable disk I had prepared previously. So, I ran diskutil list on Terminal and it showed the following:



Do you Guys think it was a virus attack? My entire hard disk is now less than 2GB? That does not make sense.

Any advice?


Regards,
Andrew

 

[MacInWin]

Not a virus. None exist for Macs. Looks to me like the drive partition table is whacked. When you boot from the bootable drive do you get any graphic window at all? Have you tried reformatting the drive? Doing that may reestablish the partition table. Do you have the Lion installer? (I think it came on DVD.) Snow Leopard came on disks, do you have them to try reinstalling SL?

 

[Rod]

You really need a bootable source to diagnose and or fix this. Preferably a bootable installer for Snow Leopard. You may be able to boot from the Lion bootable disc and erase the internal HD but you need to have the ability to instal an OS as well.

 

[chscag]

That drive is trashed like Jake said. The partition table is either messed up or the drive is south. Change it out, which is very easy to do in that model.

And by the way, Lion was only available as a download from Apple, never on a DVD. And if I were you, I would reinstall Snow Leopard. Lion was one of the worst releases of macOS. It was the end of Rosetta and PPC apps.

 

[YanAndrew]

Hi Guys,

Thank you for your replies.

I have both the Lion and Snow Leopard Installers. I have created a bootable Lion USB drive and currently I'm in the process of creating a bootable Snow Leopard USB drive. So basically I will have to boot into Snow Leopard on the bootable drive and then try to save the hard disk of the laptop from there. I hope, really hope it will work because I've checked out some YouTube videos on changing hard drives. It looks rather complicated to me. I have wiped hard drives and reinstall OSes before, but never changed any internal hard drives before so it looks rather daunting. Still, if that's what it needs then I'll just have to get on with it.

Once again, thank you for the reassurances Everybody. Much appreciate it.

Thank you,
Andrew

 

[YanAndrew]

Hi Guys,

It's Andrew again. The Hard disk is a goner just like you have pointed out so the only way is to replace it (I tried booting into Lion to erase it but no luck with that).

My question now is:
I have another old laptop, a Compaq Presario X1000 that I was gonna wipe and then dispose of it. Do you think the Hard disk will fit into my MacBook2,1 A1181? Not sure if they are relevant but I have some information on the hard disk here:





My MacBook's capacity is 160 GB, there is only a shortage of 150GB. I understand that the physical size of the hard disk is important for it to be able to fit into the space allocated in the MacBook, but that aside is there anything else that needs to be taken into account?

 

[ferrarr]

Since your MacBook is an older model, the Compaq laptop drive should fit into it.

If you have an external drive that is Mac OS X bootable, then after you put the new drive in, you will need to erase/format/wipe the drive using the bootable drive Disk Utility functions.


Sent from my iPad using Mac-Forums

 

[YanAndrew]

Hello Ferrarr,

Thank you for your reply.

I am in the process of wiping the drive from the Compaq laptop now. Once that's completed, I will attempt the drive replacement in my MacBook for the very first time. Never replace a hard disk before. And I also have the bootable Lion installer as well as the Snow Leopard ready. I am most likely going for the Lion since I have upgraded the RAM for it.

Wish me luck.

 

[MacInWin]

You will have to format the drive for the Mac. When you boot from the installer you will have the option to do that. Pick "Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and GUID for the partition map when you do that.

 

[Rod]

Do have a look at iFixit site, they have step by step instructions on taking apart repairing and assembling all mac devices and models. https://www.ifixit.com/ One of the best self repair sites you will find.

 

[chscag]

Since your MacBook is an older model, the Compaq laptop drive should fit into it.

It may fit, but I doubt it will work or even attach to the connector. Compaq did not use SATA drives in their machines - strictly IDE. His MacBook has a SATA connector.

@Andrew:

You probably are going to need to buy a new drive. You can, however, follow Jake's instructions for formatting, etc.

 

[YanAndrew]

Hi Guys,

Chscag is right, the hard disk from my Compaq does not fit due to the connector. So, I'm doing going to plonk in the hard disk from my Dell Vostro 3550 instead as I am replacing that hard disk with an SSD.

Thank you Everyone for your input.


Andrew