Macbook Pro 15", problems... if it's not the HD, what is it?

[sjohanna]

Hi everybody, this is my first message, and thank you in advance for your help/guidance/tips etc...

I will try to be as short as I can, even though a lot happened in two days.

1) My Macbook Pro froze on Wesnesday night while I was doing nothing special and wouldn't restart.
I did a lot of things I found on the internet...
Got a "SATA Warning" in CMD + S as well as a "Cannot mount root" etc.

After a day of trying to figure out whether it was the HD or not which was faulty, I bought a new HD (this MBP is my work tool, so I couldn't leave it longer).

2) I plugged in the new HD, reinstalled OSX, and ran my Time Machine during the night and it was working great this morning until 1.30pm...
Where it stopped again...

I did a hard switch off and tried to boot it again, but nothing....

I was really upset as you can understand.

3) I ran the OSX DVD and DISK UTILITY and had a "Invalid Content in Journal" error which would seemed fixed by Disk Utility but then would still be there if I ran a check.

I did some commands in the Terminal to disable the journaling, but I still coudln't mount the HD or do anything...

4) Every time I try to boot on the HD, it starts like it's going to boot in Safe Mode, but the progression bar will disappear when it reaches the middle and it won't boot even in Safe Mode.

5) I formatted a spare HD got Mac OSX on it, got DiskWarrior, and ran a disk check on my new HD. It gave me a lot of errors, but when I tried to "REPLACE", it gave me the error 2351 -36 and said it couldn't replace........

And that's where I am at the moment.... Desperate....
I thought I wouldn't post on a forum because I thought I'll find somebody who had the same issue and use the answers, but I have to say there are too many people having the same issues but not the same solutions...

I am starting to wonder if the problem comes from something else than my HD.

My graphic card?
Nvidia Geforce 9600? I read a few articles about this card, so I'm getting worrried....

Did I buy a new drive for nothing?

(My old drive wouldn't even come up any more in Disk Utility though).

If you have any idea or directions to send me to, thanks.

It's Friday and I NEED to work on Monday......

 

[chscag]

I can't really pinpoint exactly what's going on but....

It sounds like your first hard drive was defective and replacing it with the new one was the right thing to do. However, and this is just a thought.... your Time Machine backup which was restored to the new drive may have carried over file errors that were caused by the first hard drive, and now have been inherited by the new one.

I hate to recommend a clean fresh install of OS X, but that's what you may be faced with. The other possibility, since you never mentioned the model and year of your MBP, is that the problems are hardware related other than the hard drive. I don't believe from your description that it's the GPU (nVidia) that's causing it.

You may have a busy weekend ahead of you. If your machine is by chance still under warranty, a trip to your local Apple store might be a good idea.

 

[sjohanna]

Thank you for your quick answer...

I think I will reinstall OSX tonight and do a restore again during the night, then run DiskWarrior tomorrow morning on it before I run in any problem...

It still won't "replace" from Disk Warrior.

And I bought it nearly 2 years ago, so not under Warranty.......

 

[sjohanna]

I try to erase the partition from Disk Utility or create a new partition but both operation end up with an error.

The current one being "Volume Erase failed with the error: File syste, formatter failed".

What am I left with??

 

[sjohanna]

I found that the Disk Utility can run into issues to erase a 500Gb HD, so they say the solution is to do the partition. I've already tried 3 times and the error I get is always the same:

"POSIX reports: The operation couldn't be completed. Cannot allocate memory."

 

[sjohanna]

Hi all,

Any way to format my disk from a PC?

 

[cwa107]

Disk Utility doesn't have any issues formatting a 500GB drive - at least not in any of the modern versions of OS X.

It sounds like a hardware problem of some sort to me.

My next step would be to run the Apple Hardware Test and see if we can rule out a hardware issue:

Intel-based Macs: Using Apple Hardware Test