hard drivemacbook prosata
It seems there is a formatting issue / dead hdd in my macbook, as I have the infamous ? despite ensuring a good connection with the sata cable. Is it ok to plug the 2.5" macbook hdd into the standard sata & sata power cables on my windows desktop and check it out from there?
If it is working, will it show on windows?
I have no other mac to use or a sata-usb enclosure…
Thanks,
nuggetbram
Just an update - I've successfully connected my 2TB HD to my MacBook's internal SATA data connector. If anyone's interested in doing this themselves, you'll need:
You'll need to cut those plastic tabs off the SATA portion of the cable, leaving only the section with the pins - otherwise, the cable won't fit in the port.
Follow iFixit's steps for removing the keyboard section of the MacBook
Remove the hard drive, connect cable. Since we had to remove the tabs on the cable in order to make the connection, the cable does not latch in place. I recomment taping the table to the bottom of the case where the hard drive was:
Reverse the disassembly steps to put the computer back together, with the exception of the memory cover and the battery. The cable should now poke out of the hole where the battery used to be.
Install the hard drive in the external enclosure, connect the eSATA and power cables, and enjoy.
What is the exact make and model of external enclosure you are using? Some of them require an external AC adaptor. Some of them come with a duplex (two-headed) USB cable and require that both of them be plugged in to powered USB sources to provide enough voltage to run the enclosure and the drive.
Of course it is possible that your hard drive itself is damaged. If that is the case, you will need to pay a lot of money to a specialty hard disk data recovery service.
Finally, do you not already have a Time Machine backup of your Mac's internal hard drive to an external disk drive? When this current situation is resolved, it would be wise to invest in an external backup system using Time Machine.
UPDATE:
Have you tried this drive in a different external enclosure? until you do that, you can't rule out that it's the external enclosure's problem and not the drive's problem.
Best Answer
Have you tried to boot to the recovery partition ..Boot with Cmd-R held down, and use disk utility to check/repair the filesystem
In the windows PC the disk should spin up but Windows will not be able to recognise the HFS+ filesystem on it, and will offer to format it for you. Don't let it! Paragon Software produce a tool HFS+ for Windows which will allow it to mount the disk.
This will probably fail in strange and interesting ways if it is in fact corrupted. Another option might be some of the Mac Disk recovery programs e.g. Diskwarrior or TechToolPro