How I Saved a Macbook Pro and Got the Girl

Mijn probleem

My girlfriend was working on her Macbook Pro late one night and her computer started giving all sorts of errors. Rebooting gave the grey screen of death. My first thought was "hard-drive problem" and upon trying to reinstall os x my suspisions seemed to be confirmed. I purchased a new 500 GB WD Scorpio 7200rpm drive and again attempted to reinstall os x. Again, the install failed. My girlfriend started to become unhappy.

After doing much research I found that many people were beginning to have problem with their SATA cables on the Macbook Pros. This was especially the case when going from a SATA I drive to a SATA II drive. Crossing my fingers I came to this site and ordered a replacement cable for next day delivery.

Mijn oplossing

The cable replacement went smoothly. I followed the directions listed here and didn't run into a single hiccup. The only bit of trouble that I had was prying the IR assembly off of the case. I really just brute-forced it. I'm not sure if that's how it's supposed to happen but it seemed to work.

After installing the Scorpio drive and booting up with the install disk the installation went smoothly. My girlfriend was happy again and I got many kudos and beers in the fridge.

Mijn advies

If you don't have a torx driver to take the mounting screws off of the hard drive then I had pretty good success just using a pair of vice grips. The screws have plenty of surface area for a vice-grip to get purchase on.