No internal hard drives seem to work! Please help!

Hello,
I'm really hoping someone can help with this as I am losing my mind! I wanted to upgrade the internal hard drive of my 2009 Macbook Pro from the stock 250GB to a 500GB. The first try was with a Western Digital Scorpio Black (7200 RPM), the second try was with a Hitachi 5400 RPM, and the last try was with a Hitachi 7200 RPM. None of these have worked. I first noticed the problems when trying to perform a backup. Both Time Machine and SuperDuper would fail. When I tried the first drive, the OS loaded fine. But after install, the system lagged really bad. Opening applications would take much longer than they had before and even opening new windows, writing files and such seemed to cause the system to choke. Removing the hard drive and running from an external enclosure produced the same results. The drive checked out in Disk Utility and Disk Warrior. So at this point, I assumed there was something wrong with the drive. Fast forward to the second drive...At first, everything seemed fine except that I was not able to complete a backup via Time Machine or SuperDuper. However, now I was having a rough time even getting the OS installed with the drive in the computer or plugged in via an enclosure. I tried using the restore disks, a retail copy of 10.6, and a disk image of 10.6 as well. On the off chance that the OS did install completely, the system would revert back to its laggy behavior. I just thought I had EXTREMELY bad luck and purchased another drive. Same results across the board.
During attempts at backups, the system would lock up and I would have to to a hard shutdown. After that, Disk Warrior would usually find a boatload of errors to fix. But it would successfully repair.
I should also mention that I upgraded the RAM from 4GB to 8GB as well. In fact, I suspected a RAM issue, so I even bought an extra set of a different brand! The first set was from RamJet and the next was Patriot RAM. In addition, I tried using single RAM sticks; one in each bay at different times.
The laptop is at the Apple Store now. But the "genius" thinks it's a bad hard drive! I tried explaining to him that this was the THIRD hard drive to go in and that the one that was in worked perfectly when using it to boot up an iMac. I did ask him to replace the SATA cable as well thinking that maybe something might be wrong with that. But at the same time, the computer had its issues while the hard drive was in an external enclosure as well. Could it be that these newer Macbook Pro's are just really picky about what drives go in? Or am I looking at some other strange problem? Everything was working just fine before the attempted upgrade.
Any help would be much appreciated.

Assuming that you've already tried the brightness controls, you can try an SMC and PRAM resets.

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Verify and Repair disk “HD 120”
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Invalid B-tree node size
Volume check failed.
Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit
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error ""WD 120 GB" cannot be rebuilt. The original directory is too severely damaged. The disk was not modified (2155, 2179)".
I'm not sure if this is the right area to post this, but I need help as most of my important data is on this hard drive. What else can I do?
I am on a g4 quicksilver with 10.4.3 installed.

Sorry to hear about your problem but unless you are working with very large files such as with video editing, etc., using a defrag utility is not required with OS X and no defrag utility should be used on a hard drive without a backup first.
The current Disk Warrior version for Tiger is 3.0.3 and if Disk Warrior cannot repair the drive/directory, it must be in bad shape which was caused by using idefrag.
You can try using a data recovery utility such as Data Rescue (Prosoft Engineering) which includes a free trial version.

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Anything with any Mass at all is connected with an orange plastic flex cable to damp out possible shock and vibration. You can't connect the drive directly to the motherboard and have it be removeable. Original iBooks did it that way, but replacing the drive was a total tear-down.
Check on ifixit for a tear-down procedure and a replacement cable for your exact computer.

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I just bought a new internal hard drive, but it seems subtley too slow!,
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There are though all the ones I've used, TechTool Pro, Disk Utility, Intech Speedtools, none were 'perfect' or as good as the vendor's own utility which runs on Windows.
But you might do something for us - include the drive make/model version, and, do a look up with Google and see if you get any helpful hits.
How you have your system setup, number of drives and organization of files, can also have an impact.
Off hand, WD Caviar 640GB is cheap and fast, or there are some 1TB drives that look good, too.
Drives do break in over a period of days or first week, and it can help to break in and torture, zero the entire drive, run media scan, use a benchmark utility to graph I/O over the full drive.
Check out Barefeats, they do a bit of drive testing benchnmarks and see what they use and results. Or Tom's Hardware.

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I just purchased the 160 GB LaCie Mini external harddrive for my Mini. However I noticed when I play video files from the drive they appear choppy and blurred. I verified the disk in Disk Utility and got this message:
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Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
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Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit
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Then when I tried to repair it I got this message:
Verify and Repair disk 160
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Invalid extent entry
Volume check failed.
Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit
1 HFS volume checked
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SMART status is a pretty reliable indicator of what is going on. You should back up your irreplaceable files as soon as possible.

Updated to 10.4.5 and now my 2nd internal hard drive is missing...help.

I updated to 10.4.5 today with the I tunes 6.0.3. When it finished booting up my 2nd hard drive that holds all my music disappeared. I think the term is didn't mount. I am not computer savy. I have another internal hard drive that did. I used cocktail to repair permirssions and rebooted. I also, went to the apple site and downloaded 10.4.5 combo but still no luck. The hard drive does not show up in disk utilities at all. Any suggestions?
Thanks in advance....
power pc G4 Mac OS X (10.4.5) g4 12: powerbook

All I can tell you from the panic log is that there's a problem either with the video card and/or the video drivers. You might try the following:
Boot from your OS X Installer. Be sure to use the installer for the version of OS X you have installed. After the installer loads select Disk Utility from the Installer menu (or Utilities menu if using Tiger.) After DU loads select your OS X volume from the list on the left, click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the installer. Now shutdown the computer for a couple of minutes and then restart normally.
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If this doesn't help then visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on kernel panics.

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My Mac Dual 450 has been a constant problem since I installed Tiger several weeks ago. There have been crashes every day. Disk First Aid did not help. Then I discovered I had TechTool Deluxe which I had gotten from Apple a few months ago. It has diagnostics for just about everything you can think of. I tried it. Big mistake.
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Are there any suggestions on what else I can try? Is there a program that can be downloaded that mounts hard drives?
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Thanks for any help. I need it fast.

Thank you for your suggestions and your continuing interest in trying to solve my problem. I rebooted with CMD + S and got the black screen with white text. Unfortunately I could not type anything on it. I typed /sbin/fsck -y and hit return. Nothing showed on the screen. I waited awhile in case this was one of those situations where it is hidden. But nothing happened. I tried the whole sequence a couple more times and same thing: I was unable to type anything that would show up on the screen.
Am I missing something here? I tried typing holding down various keys and could not get anything to register.
For what it is worth, the last line that showed on the screen is "panic. We are hanging here..."
I do not think that is related to what I typed since it was there when the screen first appeared, but could it nonetheless have somethng to do with my computer or hard drive?
I am right now installing system X.4 onto an external HD. If I can get that to boot and work OK, I can just use that for awhile until I get the internal either replaced or repaired.
If you see my previous posts, I had a devil of a time installing system X.4 to begin with. Maybe my HD was troubled all this time??? Or could there be some other underlying problem with my Dual 450? I suppose I will find out when I try to boot from the external.
Incidentally, I have an external HD with 9.2.2 on it and have had no trouble booting from it or using it.
Thanks again for your help.
Power Mac Dual 450 Mac OS X (10.4)
Power Mac Dual 450 Mac OS X (10.4)

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For Realtek Rtl8139(x)/8130/810x PCI Fast Ethernet Controller V2.13 (020326)
PXE-E61: Media Test Failure, check cable
PXE-M0F Existing RXE ROM
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The hard drive has failed. If you are very lucky, you may be able to recover some of all of the data by removing the drive and putting it in an USB external drive housing. That system has a PATA drive so be sure and get one for an IDE drive. HERE is an example from NewEgg. You can then plug the drive into another computer's USB port and see if you can recover any of the data. You can replace the drive in the computer with a 2.5" PATA laptop drive such as the Seagate Momentus line. Toshiba has replacement drives up to 250GB. You can then restore the system with your recovery disks and hopefully you will have been able to recover something from the old drive. Consider that you've had an object lesson in the reasons to keep current backups of important data.

Crashed Hard Drive!!! Please Help!

Hi everyone, this is my first time on Mac Support, and I am in desperate need of help!
I have a black Macbook with OS 10.4.11 with the 80gig hard drive. Unfortunately the hard drive crashed and I did not back it up. Here's how it happened:
I bought a new hard drive to upgrade and installed it in the computer without installing an OS. The original hard drive I put in a SATA enclosure, and booted from that externally. While I was using the computer, the USB connection was interrupted by accidentally wiggling the cord at the connection point. The computer froze, and when I tried to reboot, the computer recognized the drive as the bootable drive, but could not boot, turned to a blue screen with the loading wheel just continuing forever, and then after about 5 minutes the computer would shut off. After taking it to my University tech center, they could not boot from it, or repair the disk. However, they got a few files off it, including mostly program files, but couldn't get any User files, which is what I desperately need and include hundreds of hours of music production that I moronically did not back-up.
When I ran Disk Utility to repair the disk, this is the message I got:
Verify and Repair disk “Macintosh HD”
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
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Rebuilding Catalog B-tree.
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Any help with this would be great!'
Thanks,
Alden

I can not say for sure that DiskWarrior can fix it....but that is exactly the kind of problem it was made for.....
You might run Apple's Disk Utility several times....I have seen Disk Utility slowly repair a drive... a little at a time....fixing a few more errors each time it is run....
Only you know what your data was worth too you....I hope something works for you....

CD Drive Doesn't Work, Please Help

Recently my Macbook was running really slowly so I restored my Macbook to factory settings. Now my CD Drive doesn't work. I can't burn CD's from iTunes or use cd's for anything. Please help!

HI Yash,
After re-installing the OS; did you check for software updates? If they're are any you may want to install them and see if it fixes your issue. I know some times things stop working after an OS install if the software updates are not installed.
Can you still boot to the install disk? (by using option boot)
If you can't option boot to the install disk, you might want to try a SMC reset. http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3964
if you still can't you may want to try a NVRAM reset.
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1379
If that doesn't help you could try the apple troubleshooting super drive article;
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht2801
if you can option boot to the install disk; but can't see disks when your booted to the built in hard drive, you might want to try a safeboot. http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1455

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Hello,
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Here is what worked for me:
http://discussions.apple.com/messageview.jspa?messageID=797432
Good luck. I learned my lesson and am backing everything onto dvd now.
Good luck

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I just purchased this same external hard drive, 3/7/2011. I hooked everything up via my USB, put in the installation CD, got the Drive Set-up window, clicked on Backup Software and got a message "C:\DOCUMEN~1\Owner\LOCALS~1\Temp\pft48F~tmp\" and "Access denied" with the only choice of clicking on "OK"; when I clicked on OK, a small window titled "unpacking backup software" appears in the upper left corner; it got about halfway through, stopped and I got an alert from my McAfee security program that it detected a trojan and removed it. Then 3 gauges appear in the upper left corner and the message "Toshiba Backup Software Installation an error occurred during the move data process of the file REFILERW.SYS!" appears and I click OK again then the Toshiba Drive Setup window appears and a green checkmark is NOT next to Backup Software. However, if I go ahead and click on the other 2 items to install, Drive Monitor Software and Power Save Software, a green checkmark appears next to them. When I then click Exit I get my regular startup screen. The Drive Monitor appears in My Programs but nothing else. Did Toshiba send me a trojan on their program?
When I checked out my McAfee to see what the name of the trojan was,it says: Artemis!8CBE6FC5C432
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It would be a false positive. Some antivirus programs look for virus like activity, and that makes them much more prone to errors.
Get rid of McAfee's and switch to Microsoft Security Essentials, it is free and very good. Security essentials is a very light program, so you will not notice any slow downs when it is running like the bloatware security programs are known for and you will have far fewer false positives.
http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/
When I used to manage a PC repair shop, we used to have people come in and pay us to get rid of McAfee's and Nortons on their systems because they would slow the computers down so much, and the false positives were making them miserable when trying to install programs that they knew were safe.
Welcome to the Toshiba user forums.
For those of you who do not know what a user forum is, it is a community of users who volunteer time to help other users. Anyone can participate. It's 100% voluntary.
Being super active is never a requirement

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Please help. I can boot up my macbook pro and log in but after that all i see is the wallpaper, toolbar and the dock. In the dock it has 2 ? where the doc and download folders should be. If I open up a new finder window it doesnt show anything in there no hard drive or anything. If anyone konws how to help let me know please and thank you.

Agree with baltwo, though even if you have saved the install app I wouldn't use it unless its been used to install a known good copy of the OS already.
In your case, that probably means start fresh:
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I have posted earlier on here when I was having problems. I did an archive & install & thought I had the issue fixed. Now it won't boot up at all. When I boot from the OSX Install CD or DiskWarrior, sometimes the hard drive won't show up. Sometimes it does, but when I go to fix errors or permissions or replace directory it says can't unmount disk. Ugh!
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Any good recovery companies out there?

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