[PLUG] Repairing a dead MacBook Pro

[Loren M. Lang]

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