Confusing Problem, Easy Fix

Mijn probleem

It was a dark and stormy night. Well, it was a Tuesday in the middle of July and I was in the middle of my summer class, as I'd just switched to comp sci as a major and was trying to catch up with other juniors. Neither of those are good times for my Mac to crap out on me.

I turned it on and all I got was a blinking question mark folder. As if the laptop was asking ME what was wrong. "What did you do?" Blink. "Where did the files go?" Blink. How should I know, laptop??

I did some expert googling and found I could do an internet recovery and redownload the OS. Easy peasy. But, apparently, I no longer had a hard drive. Great.

Mijn oplossing

My first thought was that I needed a new hard drive, and the idea of losing everything on my laptop, or taking it in for someone else to FIND everything on my laptop, made me procrastinate for a couple months on getting help. Eventually though, I did take it by my school's IT nerds. I sat around, showed a guy my blinking question mark folder, and he said, "Okay it's not the hard drive, I'm almost positive it's the cable to the hard drive, here's a link, buy it and come back." Rad. I ordered this cable, it came in the mail soon after, and I took it in.

I heard a lot of "I've never done this before, I could probably figure it out, but I don't want to risk it" which were MY sentiments and the reason I went to the IT peeps in the first place, but eventually someone volunteered to install the cable. It took him 45 min to put the cable in because he had big beefy man fingers and couldn't connect the small parts, but once it was in everything was back to normal. All my files were still there, passwords still saved. My netflix was still open in the middle of a show. Phew.

Mijn advies

If you're pretty good at copying things, you could install this yourself, and you can probably find a tutorial video.

Your old cable will be in the exact place your new one is supposed to be. Just lift up your hard drive, snap a picture for reference, and go to work. You'll have to bend the new cable to fit, but it's basically folding along a dotted line.

Don't let somebody charge you lots of money to do it though, because it's really pretty simple. Good luck, don't fret!!!