Hard drive not recognised - do I need a new hard disk?

Question

I have a 2010 year MacBook running Lion. Performance dropped off this week, all actions very slow. Then the machine would not boot, I just got the white screen with the fan circulating at the bottom. I did a re-start with control-R pressed and got the Lion console. I ran disk repair, green initially. Fix Permission was/is red and said to run run repair disk. Then the hard disk cannot be viewed in disk utility. I've been round in circles trying this a few times. I have tried to restore from time capsule and also re-install Lion. The issue is always that the machine cannot find a hard disk to install to. I have also tried putting in the Snow Leopard disk but it will not install the OS from that. Is the hard disk dead? What am I missing? I had the hard disk replaced under warranty in late 2011 just before the 1 year warranty was up. This seems poor to me. Any help appreciated.

Answer 1

That SCSC documentation is quite good. I can see why others are referencing it so often.
With that in mind, you're really facing several possibilities:
The drive is bad
The cable is bad
The system is bad
If you could do something with an external drive, like set it up to boot and load the OS, you could would at least know that the core logic board is functioning properly, excluding the SATA cable, internal HD, and any connections it makes. If it works consistently in that mode, you know the CPU, RAM, and at least most of the connections between the I/O controller are decent. I'm basing this on the SCSC document about "path isolation." I would suggest using Scannerz on it, but your system would need to be at least bootable to do that, and I'm not really sure it is. If you could get an inexpensive external enclosure to swap out drives, you could do some of these tests without needing Scannerz at all. Mind you, it would be a lot easier with Scannerz but not necessary. The big "trick" with Scannerz is that if the results can be replicated from test to test, it's the platters of the drive that are the problem (and in most cases it is), but if you're getting long irregularities or I/O errors and they don't correlate to the surface scan progress, it's either the cable (most likely) or logic board problems.
As an FYI, years ago I had a 14" iBook and it developed some type of bad connection at the junction between the hard drive connector and the logic board. Attempting to use it with an internal HD renderered the system useless. However, by connecting a small FireWire drive in an external enclosure, the system was rendered useful again. Kind of a pain in the posterior to use, but not the end of the world,FWIW. My point is that if the problem ends up being related to the logic board, it doesn't mean that system is useless.
With all this in mind, I'd like to add that Scannerz is a great product. It's clever. Genuinely clever. Using the surface scan progress to segregate drive platter problems, which are typically consistent, and cable/system problems, which typically occur randomly without warning is somewhat ingenious. Using path isolation is also ingenious. However, and I stated this on another thread, the manual that comes with the product is overly technical and long winded. Better information is obtained from their web site, for anyone interested, IMHO.