New HD won't boot internally; fine externally

Question

New HD won't boot internally; fine externally

I'm trying to swap out the hard drive on my wife's late-2008 Macbook with a new Western Digital hard drive (regular style, not a solid-state drive). Cloning the drive with Carbon Copy Cloner seems to have worked fine (including the hidden Recovery partition) as it can be booted from in an external USB case on startup. The problem starts when I switched out the old drive and placed the WD inside. All of a sudden the Macbook won't boot up and I get the flashing folder icon instead. Switching the drives back and everything's fine; I can again boot up from either drive by holding the option key on startup.

I've read that some older Macbook Pros have an issue with SATA II data transfer rates and need to be slowed down from 3.0 Gbps to SATA speeds of 1.5. Unfortunately, it according to WD's site you can't do that with WD's 2.5" drives, only their 3.5"s. I've tried it anyways with a jumper and it doesn't seem to work for me.

I've also read elsewhere that there is a limit to the size of the drive that can be placed in: 500 GB. The drive I bought is 750 GB, so if this is true, that could be what the problem is. However, I can't find any mention of this supposed limitation anywhere on Apple's site. Does anyone have a reputable source for if this is true for this model of Macbook?

Late 2008 13 inch Aluminum MacBook running Lion

Western Digital Scorpio Blue (WD7500BPVT) 750GB SATA 5400 RPM 8MB Cache 2.5" Laptop Hard Disk (OEM)

MacBook, Mac OS X (10.7.3), 2 GHz Core 2 Duo; 2 GB RAM

Posted on Feb 16, 2012 5:03 PM

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Answer 1

Feb 18, 2012 11:37 AM in response to Dave Jenkinson

I figured out the solution to this this morning. The trick was to swap the drives before the partitioning and cloning process. By booting off of the original drive in the external USB case I was finally able to see the WD in the internal drive, then I just had to re-erase and format it before cloning the original drive onto it once more.

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Answer 2

Nov 13, 2013 10:45 AM in response to Dave Jenkinson

Hi Dave, I am having the same issues with a WD Blue. Thanks for your suggestions, but doesn't work for me.

When the WD is in the MBP (15" 2010 Unibody), and I boot from an external HD, firstly the MPD says it can't recognise the WD and offers me the choice to Initialise, ignore or eject. I select initialise and disk utility reports that there is only a FAT partition of 58.2 GB on the WD. Err?

When I put the original HD (an ST950032 500GB) back in the MBP and boot off it, all is fine. I then put the WD in an external exclosure, and the MBP sees it fine and Disk Utility correctly reports a MacOS Journalled GUID partition of 465.8GB.

All the data is there (from doing an earlier clone). I just can't boot off it - weird.

Surely there is a fix for this? Have tried all the SMC / PRAM reset stuff.

The box even says that the WD Blue is 'Suitable for all operating systems (except XP) out of the box". How can you be sure that a drive you but will work in a MBP before you spend your money?

Help? Glum 😟

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