I purchased a 2009-era MacBook Pro a year ago, replaced the bad SATA drive, and promptly put Linux Mint on it. A few months ago, it failed with what looked like a hard drive issue. I booted up with a Linux LiveCD and tried to access the hard drive. dmesg reported that a SATA drive was indeed installed, but unreadable. I tried using hdparm -iI /dev/sda to retrieve the serial number and received an error back trying to read any information. It knew that a SATA drive was there but couldn't seem to acknowledge any commands so it appears that the logic board failed and it was not a mechanical error.
I filed an RMA with Western Digital and had my under-warranty hard drive "promptly" replaced in a couple weeks. I installed the drive only to discover it had the exact same error as the previous drive. I checked the serial number on the label and it was indeed different than the one I sent in for the RMA. As another test, I tried that hard drive in a USB 3.0 enclosure on a separate Linux computer and found that the hard drive was indeed the one spewing those error messages. I then found a third, spare hard drive that I first tested in my USB 3.0 enclosure. It worked so I installed it in my MacBook Pro and booted up my LiveCD yet again. Sure enough, it had the same error and could not even report it's serial number to me. I powered down and moved the spare hard drive back to the enclosure and found that that hard drive is now dead as well. It appears that the real issue is with my MacBook Pro and it's killing my hard drives. I'm assuming the power supply voltages are out of spec so I pulled out my voltmeter. Measuring the SATA power connector with the dead hard drive attached and Mac powered on, I found 5V on the 5V supply lines and no voltage on the 12V or 3.3V lines. No indication of something that might kill a logic board, but I would expect to see 12V on the supply. What's even more odd, if the issue is with the power supply, I would expect it to also affect other SATA devices, at a minimum, but yet, I can completely boot up with a LiveCD on the SATA DVD drive with no issues. I'm at a loss as what to do next to fix my poor MacBook Pro. My Mac friends keep telling me to pull out AppleCare and get it fixed right, but that's a lot of money to fix what's probably just a bad solder joint. -- Loren M. Lang KG7GAN _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
