Macbook Pro Hard Drives Failing

Hi all,
I've been having massing problems with my Macbook Pro 15" 2.53 Ghz laptop. I got one brand new with apple care in December of 2008. The hard drive was the standard 320 Gb @ 5400 RPM.
Within approximately two weeks of operation the computer failed (froze and after a hard shutdown wouldn't boot). It turned out the hard drive failed. Two weeks! So I took it back to Apple and they replaced the hard drive (took them one week so I lost a week of productivity).
One week after receiving the laptop back, the hard drive failed again! This time I believe the OS got corrupted somehow as the symptom was that it would not boot.
So back to Apple and they straight out replaced it with a new one. One week later, guess what? Failure. So back again and they replaced it.
I'm now on my 3rd laptop from Apple and this hard drive is failing. Luckily I was able to back everything up. I downloaded a utility called SMART Utility and it tells me 60 some sectors are bad on this disk.
Is anyone else having issues like this? Its absolutely ridiculous. Currently the computer is working despite the failed sectors and horrible sounds coming from the hard drive but I expect failure soon. I'll be taking this back to Apple and showing them the results of the SMART Utility, but I'm at the end of the rope here.
I've owned multiple Macbook Pros before and absolutely loved them. But now I am so disillusioned by this... To Apple's credit they have had great customer service, but now I'm at the point where I need to be able to rely on my machine.
Has anyone heard anything?

I would second Michael's comment. While hard drives do fail, the rate at which yours are failing would appear to be well beyond the statistical average. I would generally think the next level would be a problem with the MacBook itself causing the failures, but from what I can tell from your comment is that they have replaced your MacBook twice (and you're on your third?). So that would seem to rule out a problem with the MacBook itself. You mentioned that you've had other MacBooks before and it doesn't sound like you've had problems with them... so I wouldn't expect that you're doing anything unusual that would cause the problem.
You're either had a remarkable run of bad luck, or there's something going on that's out of the ordinary causing these drives to fail. I would imagine that when stores get machines, they're likely shipped from batches that are manufactured at similar times. If they had a batch of faulty drives from the manufacturer, it's possible a single store could have gotten several of them. That would still not really explain why your initially replaced drive failed as it would likely have come from a totally different batch than what would have been used in manufacturing at the time your notebook was put together. I guess it's always possible that they might put in a drive that that wasn't new.

Similar Messages

Macbook Pro hard drive failed, data recovery possible?

Hi everyone,
I have a 13 inch MBP i purchased in 2010. Late last year I experienced some issues with the computer generally slowing down and one day it would not start up, getting to the gray screen with the apple logo and loading wheel. Contacting apple support I was talked through the process of copying my hard drive contents onto an external harddrive, re installing the operating system, and then copying the contents from the external hard drive back to my internal hard drive. Then after up dating the operating system (I think to snow leopard :S) I took it to a genius bar appointment and the guy did a few tests and said my hard drives looks ok and suggested upgrading the RAM from 4gb to 8gb, which I did with no noticable improvement. But seemed to work ok for another 8 months or so.
So last week after using my MBP alot during end of semester, it suddenly turned off while using google sketch up. I tried restarting a few times which did not help. Then I searched through apple support to find an answer. I managed to get into disk utility, which told me the disk was OK. I then tried to re install my operating system which took a very long time and failed twice before getting no response at all I booked another genius bar appointment.
The guy did some tests a very quickly came to the conclusion that it was my hard drive that had failed. He gave me the option to replace the harddrive for $200, which I think I will do, however as STUPIDLY did not have any of my data backed up, I am desperate to try and recover a few important documents and my iphoto library, so have put off replacing the hard drive until I try to recover my data.
So the apple guy gave me two programs to try and recover my data. He said its a confusing an tedious process especially with no experience but I am willing to give it a go. The two programs are DISC WARRIOR and EASEUS. I know disc warrior costs money and easeus is free. He should me how to boot my MBP into target disc mode, and sold me the appropriate cable (initially a firewire cable, but then told me a thunderbolt cable would be more efficient and was cheaper.. Im sure they are right but can anyone confirm that a thunderbolt cable can be used for what I am trying to do) to connect my MBP in target disc mode, to another macbook pro, and it should connect as an external hard drive. Then with one of these programs try to recover some of my files
He said what I can recover just depends on the extent of the damage to the hard drive and what sections have failed. I am waiting for a friend to use their MBP in a few days to download one of these programs and connect my MBP.
Does anyone have any experience or advise with using either of these programs recommended by the apple guy or anyother programs that I could use? Or any advice at all in how I should go about trying to recover my files by using another Macbook pro and target disc mode? or anything else that might be helpful?
ANY help would be much appreciated guys!

If you think you can handle your own repair. your welcome to check out my User Tips on the subject
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https://discussions.apple.com/community/notebooks/macbook_pro?view=documents#/?p er_page=50

Macbook Pro Hard Drive Failed

Hi Everyone, this is going to be a tough one, but please help me.
Two days ago, my computer slowed. So I decided to do a system update, but during the update it got stuck, so i hit the reset button.
Then the laptop did not want to boot, and would get stuck with the apple logo and the circling thing underneath.
So then I entered recovery mode, but the disk utility repair always ended in an error, and installing the OS online wasn't working as well. I inserted my original LION os cds and hit the C button during start up but it wouldn't boot from CD, instead it would end up in recovery.
I bought a firewire-firewire cable, and couldn't access my laptop through target disk mode.
Finally I used disk utility to erase Macintosh HD, restarted and nothing happened. I reentered target disk mode and now I can see my hard disk. This time I erased the GIUD partition table as well, which wiped out my recovery partition.
Now when I restart, its showing a flashing question mark. The command R key does not work. The ALT or C keys also dont do anything anymore, I just end up with a white screen. I can still reset NVRAM, and the good news is I can see the hard drive through the target disk mode from another macbook pro, but thats about it. I ran disk utility's repair disk from my working macbook pro on the non working one, and it comes up okay with no problems. But when ever I restart my computer, I just get a flashing question mark.
Please help me, I just want to have a wokring laptop.

Start the MBP with the original Leopard OSX install disk holding the C key.
Proceed with the instructions until you see a menu bar on top of the display.
Select UTILITIES and from the drop down menu select Disk Utility.
Click on Disk Utility>First Aid and run verify and Repair.
What are the results?
Ciao.

Macbook Pro hard drive failing, how to recover data?

My 2 year old MBP refused to boot up this morning. I was told at the Genius Bar that the hard drive is on its way out.
It is still able to mount when hooked up to another machine but apparently the geniuses don't do data recovery. I was refferred to a data recovery service or another option was to "hook the drive up to another machine" via some sort of docking station to lift the data off myself.
I have no idea where to start with this, does anyone know how I could accomplish this myself? Thanks in advance for any tips.

I hope that will work out for you, but I have very little confidence that all will go well that way.
Your situation is one in which it makes very good sense to ignore the warranty on your hard drive, replace it yourself at your own expense, and thus be able to keep the old drive — which Apple will keep, if Apple replaces it. Once you have a new drive in your MBP and an OS up and running on it, then you can connect the old drive to it and see what can be recovered. If you hand the machine over to Apple for the replacement and lose the old drive, and then you discover that some of your files in Mac-only formats have been corrupted by being written to a Windows file system on your HP computer, you'll have no chance of recovering them.
The way to avoid all this, of course, was to keep up-to-date backups on one or more external hard drives so it wouldn't be necessary to recover anything from the failed drive. Once you get your new drive, do that.

My very expensive 2010 MacBook Pro hard drive died over a year ago (never bothered to fix it as the dvd drive had also failed so not worth it). Nevertheless, I finally decided to sync my iPhone to the replacement laptop pc and it wiped out all the music

My very expensive 2010 MacBook Pro hard drive died over a year ago. I finally synced my iPhone to the replacement laptop pc and it wiped out all the music on the phone including most of the purchases. Can I get the music back (restore didn't help)?

Okay, I finally got the couple of songs left on the phone to play by uninstalling and reinstalling itunes on the pc and re syncing. The last version I installed (just prior to my original post) failed to start due to some unspecified error?!?. Great!. But I still couldn't sync the itunes purchases from the PC to the iPhone. Then, after about an hour of googling and reading assorted posts mostly about using google to resolve the issue, I finally figured out that I have to actually download ALL the purchased albums from iCloud back onto the iPhone! There are hundreds of them, and some are not even available anymore.
Why do I have to do that when I originally purchased and downloaded all the music to the phone? Why are they all on the PC to begin with and why won't they go to the phone via the USB cable? Why didn't all the music get wiped out on the phone when I synced with the dodgy itunes I had to uninstall. never mind.
I accept that all my original music from cds and shared collections is gone on the failed mbp hard drive, but how come this once okay experience has become a trauma? Hundreds of songs to download all over again, sheesh, this has not exactlybeen a "That Was Easy" experience guys.

My 2008 Macbook Pro logic board failed...am I still able to copy that hard drive onto my 2011 Macbook Pro hard drive?

My 2008 Macbook Pro logic board failed...am I still able to copy that hard drive onto my 2011 Macbook Pro hard drive?

What you can do is to extract the hard drive from your old computer, put it in an enclosure and connect it to your newer computer, so you can restore your data.
It's not too difficult to do it yourself, but if you think you will do something wrong, take it to a store where you can get your data restored

My MacBook Pro hard drive is almost full and I wish to store my Aperture Library on an external drive, how do I do this and is the use of USB2 suitable or do I need to use a Firewire external hard drive?

My MacBook Pro hard drive is almost full and I wish to store my Aperture Library on an external drive, how do I do this and is the use of USB2 suitable or do I need to use a Firewire external hard drive?

You'll get better performance if you use a Firewire hard drive (especially if you buy a 7200 RPM drive). Firewire's IO speed is significantly faster than USB 2. USB 2 has a theoretical max speed of 480 Mbps except that it has extremely high over-head. The fastest speeds you can typically get are about 300 Mbps. Firewire, on the other hand, has very little overhead. The fastest speeds you can get are very nearly 800 Mbps. You will typically be constrained by the maximum read/write speed of the drive, not the speed of the I/O on the Firewire bus. Now if you had one of those nice shiny new Macs with the Thunderbolt I/O and a Thunderbolt drive (Light Peak) ... I think they alter space and time so that your data arrives before you know you want it.
Also... unless you want to buy a solid state drive (very expensive), try to keep your hard drives from becoming much more than about 60% full if you want great performance. A nearly "full" hard drive is, on average, only about half as fast as the same hard drive when nearly empty.
USB 2 will work perfectly fine... just not as fast.
Also... it's much safer to move the entire Aperture library than to "relocate masters". Your images must be managed. You can Aperture manage them, or you can manage them. But someone has to manage them. If you "relocate" them so that they are no longer stored inside the Aperture library then you'll need to work out a system of how you decide to organize things and it's critically important that you don't start moving files around or deleting things without Aperture's knowledge. If you do, you'll break the links to your masters and start having problems with missing masters. If you have Aperture manage the library then you don't need to worry about any of that stuff.... it's safer.
Do make backups (use the Aperture Vault or use some other backup program, but make sure you back up your work if you care about it.) There are only two kinds of hard drives in the world: (1) those that have failed and (2) those that are going to fail. There are no exceptions to this rule. Hard drives are cheap. Backup software is built into Aperture and into your Mac.

New 15" Macbook Pro hard drive failure

It is common for a 15" Macbook Pro hard drive to crash after 3 months? How does Apple Support generally fix? Genuis bar seemed overwhelmed by holiday crowds and recommended an $8k 3rd party vendor.

"Any disk can fail at any time."
Over a large sample, the drives used are extremely reliable. You did not have a large sample, you had ONE drive.
Now you are much smarter than you were before this disaster. Apple will not pay for your data recovery. You (and everyone) need a backup solution.
Apple provides an excelent backup solution called Time Machine, that can do hourly backups to an external drive without disturbing your current work. Buy yourself an external drive at least twice as large as the built-in. Turn on Time machine, make sure it is working, plug it in at least daily, and then don't worry about it any more.

I can not store all my Music on my internal Macbook pro hard drive so I am storing it on a large external drive connected to my airport extrem. How do I get Itunes to search for the music here with out trying to copy it to my laptops hard drive??

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How did you move the music to the external drive? What exactly is on the drive? The entire iTunes folder or only music? If it is the entire iTunes folder you can do the option+start suggestion earlier. If you copied only music and did so by dragging it there then you need to delete it again and consolidate/organize it there instead so iTunes tracks the move. iTunes 12 for Mac: Change where your iTunes files are stored - http://support.apple.com/kb/PH19507

My MacBook Pro hard drive crashed a little while ago and has been replaced. Is it possible to take tunes from iPod Classic and transfer all of them back to iTunes on computer?

My MacBook Pro hard drive crashed a little while ago and has been replaced. Is it possible to take tunes from iPod Classic and transfer all of them back to iTunes on computer? Is this just for purchased tunes or can I do it for ones that have been burned from CD's as well? Thanks for any help!

[Zevoneer's detailed instructions on getting music off an iPod|http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=9053179]
[Wired's How To: Get Your Music Off of Your iPod|http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Get_Your_Music_Off_of_Your_iPod]
[http://www.metaphoriclabs.com/articles/5-ways-to-copy-music-off-your-ipod-window s-mac-os-x/]
[Topic: Get music off iPhone|http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=11512841]
[Copying iTunes Store purchases from your iPod or iPhone to a computer|http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=305465]

My macbook pro hard drive went bad and i bought a new one and installed it. Now i have the old corrupted hard drive in my hand and i am looking to recover my files from it, any suggestions please? too bad i never backed them up.

My macbook pro hard drive went bad and i bought a new one and installed it. Now i have the old corrupted hard drive in my hand and i am looking to recover my files from it, any suggestions please? too bad i never backed them up.

After you have installed the OSX on the new HDD in your MBP, install the old HDD in an enclosure and connect it to your MBP via USB. Then try to drag and drop your data to the new HDD.
If this proves unsuccessful, you may look for data recovery software on the Internet. There will be free trails to see if it will work or not. If the trial suggests that it will work, then you will have to purchase the software.
The last resort is a professional data recovery service that will offer NO guarantees and charge a lot of money.
As you now can appreciate, backups eliminate such predicaments.
Ciao.

My MacBook Pro Hard Drive recently gave me the gray folder with the question mark of death. Even as

My MacBook Pro Hard Drive recently gave me the gray folder with the question mark of death. Even as a Mac Newbie/Novice, I successfully installed a new hard drive and the OS (10.6.8) software from my installation discs. I have, however, lost the ability to play video using the spacebar and I have no idea on the steps necessary to correct this seemingly simple technical blip. .Here's my system overview:Model Name: MacBook Pro Model Identifier: MacBookPro6,2 Processor Name: Intel Core i5 Processor Speed: 2.4 GHz Number Of Processors: 1 Total Number Of Cores: 2 L2 Cache (per core): 256 KB L3 Cache: 3 MB Memory: 4 GB Processor Interconnect Speed: 4.8 GT/s.
I am using the Premiere Pro CS5 NLE (with the 5.0.4 updates), and I have tried to reinstall the software (which is actually the Production Premium package) several times, but I still cannot use the spacebar (or any method) to play any of my imported videos.
PLEASE HELP in any way you can!
Prior to having to replace my hard drive, my software was working just fine. No problems at all. But now, it seems that I can't get it to play whatever type of file I import.
Again, I am a newbie to the Mac, so any and all correctional/repair assistance needs to be expalined as if I were a child : )
I would hate to try to revert to considering the sophmoric Final Cut Pro X editing software package, but I've got to do something to be able to get back to my editing activities.
zionhall
[email protected]

Jorge242 wrote:
@FatMac the internet recovery doesnt work. It goes into recovery mode and then when i try to reinstall it cant find a disk to install it to. So what would be a good choice to take now?
Recovery Mode presents you with, among other things, Disk Utility. When you open that, if the internal shows up at all, first try to "Repair DIsk." If that doesn't work but if the "Media" line is present, try to format and partition it with a GUID partition table (understand that you will be erasing the contents of your internal). Then try to reinstall the OS. If that doesn't work, and since your Retina MBP didn't come with a DVD drive or DVDs, you'll need to try a hardware test using these instructions from Apple (short version: shut down, press the power button and hold down the "D" key). If none of those things work, let's hope you either have AppleCare or your warranty has some life left because the SSD in your rMBP is proprietary and expensive. You'll need to bring it to an Apple Genius for evaluation.

My macbook pro hard drive died. I only have a windows hard drive and an old powerbook G4 which of course you can't use to create a boot disk for my macbook. How can I solve this?

I can't get app store on my old power book to download OS X, My macbook pro hard drive died and all I have is a windows hard drive, still has windows os on it, a 500 Gb USB drive and this power book. How can I get my macbook back up without spending money? Thanks

And what happens if the OPs Mac is of a newer version that came with a version of Snow Leopard above the 10.6.3 version that is on that Retail, meant for Upgrade, disc? Like if it came with 10.6.4/.5/.6/.7? That disc you linked to would not work.
He needs to contact Apple and get a replacement set of Original System Reinstall Discs. That is the only way he can be assured it will work and he would also get the iLife apps which he wouldn't buying that DVD disc you linked to.
dwb wrote:
The Snow Leopard DVD is $20 from Apple. You'll just have to wait a few days. BTW this is a full installer that works with any model computer that can run SL. Apple used to ship recovery/installation disks that were tied to specific computer models so that a 15" MBP installer disk coudn't be used on a 13" MBP computer. So you need either full installer or the recovery disks for your specific model.
And BTW, I have a 2009 13" MBP w/8GB RAM that is running Mavericks. With a 5400 RPM drive I used to experience a bit of beach balling (think hour glassing) but an SSD has given it new life. It feels now slower than the newest MBPs - it obviously benchmarks considerably slower but in everyday use it doesn't feel like a 4 1/2 year old computer at all.

Can I Replace my Early 2009 Mac Mini Hard Drive with my Early 2011 Macbook Pro Hard Drive?

I am replacing my 2011 Macbook Pro Hard Drive with a Solid State Drive. Instead of keeping the hard drive on an external enclosure I was wondering if I can use it to upgrade my Mac Mini's 160GB hard Drive with the one Im taking out of the MBP. And if so, is there any special formatting I would need to do?

It should work fine. No special formatting required. It actuality, I suspect that if you connect the HD, the Mini will boot into the OSX that was on the MacBook.
When you replace the HD in the Mini just be careful with the antennas and their wires and connections I accidentally disconnected the wifi antenna on mine when I replaced the HD.

2011 Macbook Pro Hard Drive Upgrade?

Hi. I am looking at upgrading my 2011 Macbook Pro hard drive. I want to get a 7200 RPM hard drive. I have been looking on Newegg and doing some research, and from what I can tell, the 2011 Macbook Pro uses a 3.0GB/s interface. If I were to buy a hard drive that has a different interface, like a 6.0GB/s interface, would it be compatible? Does anyone know the sizing for an MBP hard drive?
Also, it doesn't matter who the manufactorer is right?
And finally, does anyone have any recommendations?

But in my Honest opinion I don't think you'll really notice the difference between the 5400 and 7200 rpm unless your rendering large video files or transfering large amounts of data to an external or USB drive. But again you'll be limited on the speed of the external connections that your transferring too... If you really want to notice a difference, get the SSD with a Sata 3 or 6.0GBs connection speed. But the difference between a 5400 and 7200 rpm drive for normal tasks is almost negligable, you probably won't even notice the difference, but if you get the SSD you'll definately notice a difference in boot time, transfer speed, video rendering speed, copying speed of large files, etc...

Macbook Pro Hard Drives Failing

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