[PLUG] Repairing a dead MacBook Pro

KW kilowattradio at comcast.net
Thu Sep 18 07:33:40 UTC 2014


I've never looked at a schematic for the Macbook, but if your third HDD
is now bad I think there may be a problem with the power supply or an
internal voltage regulator that is frying the electronics of your HDD's.


On 09/17/2014 02:30 PM, Loren M. Lang wrote:
> 
> 
> 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. 
> 



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