Hard drive upgrade wont show on disk utility

Im trying to upgrade a white 13 inch macbook from a 80gig Toshiba drive to a seagate momentus 500gb drive. Ive been at it all day with no luck. I swapped it but when i restart with the installation discs inside and go to disk utility to format, it just wont show. I ended up taking apart one of my external drives and using the adaptor from there and plugging it in as an external via usb and the drive shows on the laptop. I was able to format it (extended journaled) but as soon as i put it back in, its a ghost drive.
Im thinking since the drive works perfectly via usb but just wont work inside the laptop maybe in had something to do with the power. The old drive is rated DC+5V at 1.0A and the new seagate drive is DC+5V at 0.4...something A . This means the old one drew more current and therefore more power P=VI . So the laptop should be able to power it.
Any ideas what could be going wrong? Solutions?
any help is greatly appreciated, im getting close to giving up.

I would recommended a Hitachi Travelstar 500GB 7200 RPM HD20500IDK/7K 16MB Buffer 7200RPM 5V 800mA DC as a much better drive than the Seagate Momentus, I've seen and read many negative reviews and feedback about the Momentus.
I replaced the original 250GB 5400RPM hard drive in my MacBook 2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo: (13-inch, Late 2009) – Model A1342 Polycarbonate Unibody ( MC207LL/A ) with a 7200 RPM HD20500IDK/7K with no problems at all and The Hitachi Travelstar 500GB is extremely fast and quiet.

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Internal hard drive fails to mount in Disk Utility.

My internal hard drive fails to mount in Disk Utility for the past year, so I cannot verify it. However, it does mount in Disk Warrior. (1) I am concerned that it will not mount within the Apple software, and what that bodes for my computer. (2) I also have MANY spinning beach balls daily and have to use the power button to reboot. I just bought extra Crucial RAM and have yet to install it. Somehow, I don't think it wil help my issue # 1 though. Please advise, anyone out there! Thank you.

No, there are never any errors like that. Also, I have upgraded the Mac OS from 10.5 to 10.6.8. That did nothing. I backed up my Users = Christina folders to a good, 15 year old Firewire 800 La Cie 1 TB external hard drive. I also tested using the Apple Hardware test, which showed no problems, and Alsoft's Disk Warrior and defragged, and fixed a very minor issure re directory count, probably resulting from many improper shutdowns lately due to frozen spinning beach balls. None of these procedures alleviated the issues, and I still have the same issues: mainly that super-frequent spinning beach ball. Do you think I ought to install that new RAM sitting here finally? Perhaps it is a lack of RAM??I only have 2 lousy GB's of RAM after all! Thank you so very much for a reply.
Message was edited by: Flamingcreatures

Internal hard drive does not mount in disk utility

My internal hard drive no longer mounts in Disk Utility. It is grayed out. I have extraordinarily frequent spinning beach ball/freezes, in Safari or Apple Mail. The most recent symptom: upon rebooting or just starting up, I see flashing black on the display. This has been occuring for more than six months. Of course, I have made total and frequent backup's. I bought new RAM, but have not yet installed it, and I susect this might help. I have done repeted troubleshooting many times each: Apple's Disk Doctor, Repaired Permissions, Reinstalled the Mac OS, safe boot, Alsoft's Disk Warrior, Apple's longer Harware Test, etc. I have worked as a new user, too. All tests done report that all is well. What od you thnk the problem is? Must I drive 1.5 hrs. each way to the Genius Bar at my nearest Apple Store? Might I try to erase the hard drive as a fix? I hate to do this, only as a last resort, as it is so time-consuming. Should I just update my Mac OS? Please advise, out there, if anyone can offer any advice, I would be greatly appreciative.

The list of issues you posted probably would not get shorter if you attempt to 'upgrade them' away, as usually that kind of effort is not effective yet may expose more of the same problems while not necessarily revealing the original weakness. Another OS X installed over a set of problems seldom helps.
How full is the hard disk drive? If it is too full, or has been very busy in use several years, it may be time to replace the HDD and perhaps put a larger capacity one in the computer. And if the main computer hardware checks out OK (tested under a variety of duration and stress tests) then also consider a RAM upgrade if the device is not already at the maximum capacity.
When was the last time the hard disk drive was devoid of content, maybe wiped -- erased and reformatted by a third party disk utility or have a utility overwrite the entire HDD with zeros? This used to be a common tech service in the course of a major effort to restore a Mac. Or Defragment?
If you can do the latter, this could help resolve bad sectors and remove old data or corruption on the hard drive. Or get a new HDD and before committing a new OS X install & apps to it (or a re-clone of a complete backup) test the drive and be sure it is ready for use. Not all new drives are perfectly ready; some need to get exercise first.
I'd bet on a new hard disk drive of larger capacity (also note spin RPM rate and data speeds) and a full RAM upgrade.
If you have a backup clone on an external hard disk drive (in a boot-capable enclosure) you could really go to town and before you erase the main/only hard drive, make a backup clone and test its ability to boot the Mac. Or put the old drive and content in a suitable boot capable enclosure of the kind with its own power supply, and deal with it later.
Then consider a later version OS X -- whatever most recent version that model can support... {edited}
Good luck & happy computing!

When i plug my ipod in, it shows up on desktop as a hard drive, but wont show up on itunes. All my music/videos everything has been wiped off somehow, restored it and still wont work! Please help!

When i plug my ipod in, it shows up on desktop as a hard drive, but wont show up on itunes. All my music/videos everything has been wiped off somehow, restored it and still wont work! Please help!

- Have you tried the troubleshooting here:
iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch: Device not recognized in iTunes for Windows
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http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1500
- Do you have any camera, scanner or similar software installed? That may prevent iTunes from seeing the iPod.

Internal hard drives won't appear in Disk Util

I have a bizarre problem with my hard drives now. I'm on a 2.4GHz Core2Duo Macbook Pro 15" with 10.5.4. I've switched the hard drive a couple of times before with no issues whatsoever. Now, with the exception of the brand new one that won't hold an install, my internal hard drives don't show up in the install disk's Disk Utility.
I got a new hard drive to try the other day, installed it, booted to my OSX install disk to use Disk Utility. I switched the new disk to GUID and formatted it as journaled like usual. It took 4 hours to do the install, then after the restart it tanked. It booted back to the install disk where I checked it out. It could not repair the file system, and the drive was not "mounted". I mounted it, repartitioned and formatted it, and installed again. This time it stopped halfway through the installation and said the drive might be corrupt.
I unplugged the cable and battery, held the power button for over 5 secs, then just let it sit for about 10minutes with no power source while I thought about this. I put the original drive back in, booted into OSX, and put the new hard drive in an external USB enclosure. I formatted it while in OSX, then rebooted into the install disk and installed OSX on it while it was in the USB case. It took the installation more quickly (about an hour and a half...still not 20min like my old 7200rpm Hitachi 200g), then I booted into its OSX while in the USB drive. It booted ok, so I downloaded the updates and clicked to install them. It then went into a revolving restart. Eventually I decided it was not doing this because it was happy so I shut it off.
I swapped the hard drive out with another new one, and this one would not complete an installation while inside the computer either. It acted similarly while in the USB case. HOWEVER it would always show up as unmounted after a restart and would not recognize the drive inside the computer as a bootable disk.
I put my original drive in there to give up, and it gave me the ? folder. I booted to the install disk and it did not show up in the disk utility. I put my old hard drive in the USB case, booted to the install disk, and it showed that it was there, but unmounted and it could not repair the file system.
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I went out and bought a stardard 160GB SATA 5400rpm Seagate drive to try in there, and this fresh drive is not recognized inside the computer either when I boot into disk utility.
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I'm originally a Windows slave, so I can only think in terms of AHCI or SATA-card drivers, or screwed up bios. But this is all pre-os-boot, and the apple firmware seems to be pretty automatic in picking the right settings to see stuff.

I kind of feel like drawing a flowchart to show all that I've tried. Its difficult to keep everything intelligible while listing the entire last week's efforts at 2:45am. :-/
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=41951
I also explained it here, perhaps a bit differently. Maybe some reply there might spark someone's memory of a possible problem. I understand the nature of computers (been 100% geek for 20 years), but I'm hoping there's someone out there with the specific Apple expertise to help me out. Eventually the processes I've taken and my specific situation will become clearer as the questions widdle away at this.
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The new SSD SATAII does show up, but after a 4hr install the partition is unmounted and won't show up as a boot option. I can boot to the install disk and repartition it, reinstall, or remount it. But it will never be mounted to be booted from while connected to the computer. I've had 2 of the SSD's to try, one survived one restart, then went into a never-ending restart cycle after I installed the updates. The 2nd has never successfully been mounted after the install to boot from. Now nothing can be mounted to boot from within the computer. I have to boot off of any of these drives from the USB enclosure.
If I install OSX on them while in the USB enclosure, that works, but they will not mount when connected to the SATA cable inside the lappy. The platter style SATA drives won't even be recognized...
Thanks for the instant reply, this is driving me nuts 'cuz it makes almost no sense. Thanks so much to everyone that contributes. I appreciate everything.

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Drive Preparation
1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder.
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
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Can't access/mount hard drive, Permission denied message in Disk Utility.

Hello,
Need some help here. I was upgrading from 10.4 to 10.5. I got an error message when I tried to upgrade from the DVD. My hard drive had an exclamation mark by it and I was told I would need to erase it in order to install. When I tried quitting the installer, I had to go through startup disk to pick my Hard drive, which showed it had 10.4 installed. When I tried restarting, it would only boot off of the DVD. I checked startup disk again, but my hard drive was now not visible. I have a tower with a back-up system on it. When I picked it, it started up fine. I went under disk utility and the hard drive is listed, but is ghosted/grayed out. Repair & Verify Disk permissions are ghosted back as well.When I try to repair or verify disk, it says it can't it gives me the disk number and sector number and Permission Denied. I poked around on disk utility for info, and it looks like it doesn't have a mount point anymore and under permissions, it says that they are not enabled. So, apparently the access privileges have been erased & I don't know how to mount my disk again. I'm assuming I need some sort of commmand line in Terminal to restore my priveleges or get it to auto-mount. I do not want to erase my drive to upgrade. All my applications are on that drive. Please help!
Message was edited by: koobiak

See if Niel's User Tip can help you: I accidentally set a disk's permissions to No Access .

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I have a Macbook and I believe the hard drive has crashed. When I turn it on, I get the circle with line through it and the folder with question mark inside blinking.
I got the Install Disk 1 to boot up but can not verify the hard drive. I get the following message "No Valid Packages" and disk verification fails. I also checked the SMART status of the hard drive and it says "Not Supported".
I also can not re-install the operating system, as there is no hard drive that shows up to install it to when I try to run the installer disk.
I know I need a new hard drive, much bigger one. I'm purchasing this today, a 320gb Samsung M6 Series internal drive and a Western digital external 500gb WDE1U5000N.
I also want to purchase the Prosoft Data Rescue but have several questions:
1)I read the this can work if disk utility sees the hard drive. The hard drive is seen in disk utility, but like i said before the drive has failed and it can not mount. I've read other reviews that said Prosoft can still be used in this case, but I want to make sure..please define what is meant by "disk utility being unable to see the hard drive"...Does this mean "dead hard drive or the hard drive not physically being VISIBLE in disk utility (because mine is, I just can't mount or verify it)
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Sorry for the questions but I want to buy today by 5pm so it ships by Friday to me to fix this ASAP, thanks!

I read the this can work if disk utility sees the hard drive.
Prosoft Data Rescue can help recover files after a software failure. (Usually related file directory problems.) It sounds, however, that you've experienced a hardware failure of your original hard drive. No amount of software can ever recover a hard drive from a hardware failure. If you really need to recover the data, a data recovery service may be able to help. The cost will depend on the steps needed to recover the data and how much data is recovered.
-Doug

Replacement Hard Drive does not appear in Disk Utility.

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Until you replace the cable you won't know for sure. Do you have a SATA to USB adapter to connec these other drive to and to connect your original drive to? If you do connect the original drive and do a Verify Disk in Disk Utility. If it comes back OK, no repair needed or even if a repair is need that succeeds, your original drive is OK and it is the cable that is causing all the problems.
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i formatted two external hard drives using disk utility on my mac mini, now they do not show in finder. they can be seen in disk utility but the repair options etc are greyed out?

Try http://pondini.org/OSX/DU1.html
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Turns out it is possible:
Maxtor Support..
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The USB Hard Drive is working fine since I'm able to open it when I connect it to MacBook Pro. The USB Hard Drive is already pre-formatted in Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format.
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matthewfromlincoln wrote:
I've been using a western digital my book (500gb) external hard drive connected to my Airport Extreme for TIme Machine Backups.
I hate to have to tell you this, but backing-up that way is unreliable, and not supported by Apple. See Using Time Machine with an Airport Extreme Air Disk.
But, as ds store says, the disk is likely dead.

Hard drive upgrade wont show on disk utility

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