Hi, I have a mid 2010 13" MacBook Pro and I keep getting a POSIX error when trying to format my new harddrive. Help?

Question

Hi guys, one day I turned my MacBook Pro on and it was frozen at the login screen, so I did a hard shutdown and restarted it just to get a blank white screen that didn't change. So I took it to the apple store for a genius appointment and they diagnosed the problem as a failed hard drive. So I got a new hard drive and bought snow leopard installation disc since I didn't have my original installation anymore and installed the new harddrive. I go to disc utility to erase it and create a new partition on it so the Mac will recognize it as a viable option to install snow leopard on, and I get a POSIX error that says: "the operation could not be completed. Cannot allocate memory."
So I call Apple and I'm told that it could very possible be the hard drive cable which is failing me here and not allowing the connection to the HDD. So I ordered the appropriate one on Amazon for my make and model (can be found here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B004VSZCL4/ref=ya_aw_oh_pit)
A lot of the reviews say a new one of these cables fixed their problems with the POSIX error, so I'm wondering what you guys think of this? And if you have any other ideas that could help out?
Any advice would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Zach

Answer 1

Zachy,
It goes something like this...
Put your new drive in the enclosure. Use Disk Utility to format it, etc. I'd give it a slightly different name than the original. Let's say you have Old Disk and New Disk as your drive names. Use Carbon Copy Cloner to copy Old Disk to New Disk. Now you should have an exact copy, which you can test by rebooting and holding down the Option key. Choose New Disk from the list and let it boot, make sure all is well.
Shut down and physically swap the drives. Take Old Disk and put it in the enclosure. Now your system has a new disk with a lot more space and you can reformat your old disk and just use it for large files or whatever.