Deleted My Hard Drive?

[czechyes]

Hi everyone -- so long story short, I have a 2009 MacBook Pro. I've already had to replace the hard drive in it twice and now it seems to be messing up again.

I couldn't get the computer to start so I used disk utilities to delete the original partition and create a new one, but I think that made matters worse. Nothing comes up when I look for drives starting with the option key and when I try to access disk utilities using command + r the entire thing freezes up. Any insight or ideas would be greatly appreciated!

 

[pertusis1]

Sorry to hear that.

For starters, if you think you might have a failing hard drive, the first thing you'll want to do is copy the data onto another drive. As you have already noticed, partitioning a drive that's in trouble is not likely to help.

Since your laptop has a CD drive, you should consider putting the original OS X disk in and starting up holding 'C' down. That may allow you to use the disk utility on the CD. Let us know how that goes.

Oh, and as a side note, this is the MacPro forum, not the Macbook Pro forum. If there's an administrator around, could you move this to the correct forum?

 

[DeltaMac]

...
I couldn't get the computer to start so I used disk utilities to delete the original partition and create a new one, but I think that made matters worse. Nothing comes up when I look for drives starting with the option key and when I try to access disk utilities using command + r the entire thing freezes up. Any insight or ideas would be greatly appreciated!

If you deleted the original partition - did you then reinstall OS X on the new partition?
If not, you have no system installed - that partition won't show up when looking for a boot partition, if no system is installed.
Boot to your Recovery partition (the command+R) and reinstall OS X.
BTW, deleting the partition also means that you lost everything that you don't already have backed up.
If you DID reinstall OS X already - boot to your recovery partition anyway. Open Disk Utility, and select your partition, then click Repair Disk.
If your drive is not visible in Disk Utility, or you get errors when you try to repair, then your drive may simply be dying - or already dead.

Two hard drives already, and now another?
Then, your hard drive(s) may be good, and the SATA cable may need to be replaced. It's not rare to have the cable go bad.

 

[czechyes]

If you deleted the original partition - did you then reinstall OS X on the new partition?
If not, you have no system installed - that partition won't show up when looking for a boot partition, if no system is installed.
Boot to your Recovery partition (the command+R) and reinstall OS X.
BTW, deleting the partition also means that you lost everything that you don't already have backed up.
If you DID reinstall OS X already - boot to your recovery partition anyway. Open Disk Utility, and select your partition, then click Repair Disk.
If your drive is not visible in Disk Utility, or you get errors when you try to repair, then your drive may simply be dying - or already dead.

Two hard drives already, and now another?
Then, your hard drive(s) may be good, and the SATA cable may need to be replaced. It's not rare to have the cable go bad.

Thanks for the quick follow ups!
Some more details -- I replaced my cable about 2 years ago as well so that shouldn't be an issue.
When I restart pressing option, my hard drive shows up. However, I can't download the OS X here because after I try to download lion (which is my only option) an itunes error comes up and it doesn't work.

My hard drive also shows up in disk utility using this booting option.

When I do command r or hold down c while starting, my hard drive is not recognized.

 

[flowrider]

And you might run into folks having the same problem if you posted this in the correct forum:

https://forums.macrumors.com/forums/90/

Lou