New Hard Drive doesn't show on MBP - faulty drive?

Question

Hi
I've tried to replace the hard-drive on my mbp 13" after having problems with the old drive. Basically, although the old hard-drive was visible I couldn't unmount it and guy at Apple genius bar said I'd need a new one.
Bought a Samsung M7 500GB 2.5 inch SATA II 8MB Cache, 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive, installed it and tried to set up new install of OSX. However, the prompt for where i want to install the software was a blank box (I believe it should have shown the hard-drive here). It was also not visible in disk utility.
I put the old drive back in and that was still visible in disk utility. My question is whether there is something I need to do to identify the new HD or if it would appear to be faulty.
All suggestions greatly appreciated.
Thanks

Answer 1

Get yourself a IDE/SATA to USB adapter for about $20 online.
Put the old drive back into the machine and connect the new drive to the adapter.
If Disk Utility still doesn't see the drive, then follow these directions:
This is going to sound unusual, but works in cases like this.
1: Download and burn to cd a ISO of PartedMagic, first download choice is what you need
http://partedmagic.com/doku.php?id=downloads
2: Open Disk Utility and open the ISO and click burn, stick in a cd-r
3: Once that's finished, connect ONLY the external to the computer (no other drives) and reboot with the PartedMagic disk in holding the c key down
4: Your going to see a screen to "Load into RAM" it's the default choice, press return (PartedMagic doens't install anything onto your harddrive, just into RAM which gets flushed upon reboot)
5: When the cd ejects, remove it.
6: After about what seems to be a lot of technical mobo jumbo appearing on your screen your going to arrive at a desktop like environment.
7: On the left is a icon called Partition Editor, double click that.
8: Now be careful, a window will appear with your boot drive, don't select or delete anything here
9: select the /dev/sdb  (size of your external hard drive) from the top right corner, confirm that it's the external sized drive or you'll be sorry if you selected the wrong device.
(note the name may be different on your machine perhaps /dev/sda  or /dev/sdc, just make sure to choose the external sized drive and if unsure don't do anything and quit)
If PartedMagic doesn't see your drive, then it's really not working. Use the Log out>restart from the lower left hand corner to boot back into OS X.
10: If you see the drive, you will see the drive as unformatted, that's confirmation you picked the right one.
11: Format the drive MBR with FAT32. (Apple's disk utility calls it MSDOS) click Apply
12: Close the window with the tiny X box in the top corner, then select the disk icon in the bottom right corner and "log out" with restart. You'll boot into OS X again like normal.
13: Open Disk Utility, click the external drive "media" on the left, click the Partition tab, 1 partition, option GUID, OS X Extended (Journaled) and click Apply.
14: Then click Erase> give the drive a name >Security Option> Zero All Data> click Erase
You may have to perform #14 before you do #13 if the drive is not formatting
I don't know why OS X is refusing to see drives as of late, or not unmounting them and so forth, but using PartedMagic which is based upon Linux seems to work exceeding well at jumpstarting or erasing the drive.
What you do now depends if you want to reinstall OS X fresh or start anew.
For OS X Lion your going to need to copy the Lion Recovery Partition from the old drive to a 1GB USB thumb drive, formatted GUID and OS X Extended in Disk Utility just like you did the drive above.
Then run this software from Apple to copy your Lion Recovery Partition to the USB key.
https://support.apple.com/kb/dl1433
You can use a blank external drive to Carbon Copy Cloner your old boot drive partition (either Snow Leopard or Lion) to the external drive. It will then become hold the option key bootable. So do that and check it out as your going to be needing it. CCC cloning doesn't work for Filevaulted drives or Bootcamp partitions naturally, only OS X cloning.
Cloning only clones the Lion OS X partition for now, a beta version supposedly is out that will clone both Lion and the Recovery Partition at the same time.
Once you got the new drive into the machine, hold option and boot off the Lion USB to format (GUID OS X Extended) the internal drive ad install the Lion Recovery Partition/Lion.
Then you can option boot off the external clone or the old drive attached with the adapter and use CCC to clone the Lion Partition onto the internal Lion Partition.
For Snow Leopard the steps are the same, just you don't need to mess with the Lion Recovery Partition, just clone right off.
Or with Snow, just hold c boot off the grey or white installer disks and go from there.
https://discussions.apple.com/message/16276201#16276201