No boot condition after upgrade to 10.8.3, EFI 1.6, Mid-2009 15" MBP 2.53Ghz

Update for anyone interested...

I received my Seagatedrive, cloned it, jumpered it to throttle down to 1.5gb/s and installed it. Booted up with no issues as expected. Upgraded to ML 10.8.3 and so far no issues. I'm going to let this burn in for a few days/weeks before doing the EFI 1.7 upgrade.

Will update again if there is a status change or when I get to the next EFI.

Final update for me...

EFI 1.6 didn't last a day before I had to upgrade to 1.7.

Since then... all is good.

I'm in the same situation — upgraded my 2009 MBP's hard drive years ago, stayed at EFI 1.6. My main partition is Snow Leopard, but I keep a smaller Mountain Lion partition to run a few modern apps. I upgraded that partition from 10.8.2 to 10.8.4, and now it won't boot at all. Since it was not my main boot volume, I did not have a backup of it, via either Time Machine or another means.

How do I roll back to 10.8.2? When I download the "Install OS X Mountain Lion" app from the App Store, it is of course the latest version, 10.8.4.

-Ken

I'm having the same problem with my 15" 2.53, built Jan 2010. I installed a 750GB 7200 RPM Western digital drive in 2011. Had a 3 day nightmare with the SBOD and freezing unsder SL 10.6.6, so I eventually downgraded my Firmware to 1.6 and all worked fine until the 10.8.3 update and it wouldn't boot straight after updating!!

I re-installed 10.8.2 and all was good for a while until I wasn't able to update a lot of my apps, so I updated to 10.8.3 again, same problem. It will boot 1 out of 10 times but wakes from sleep most times.

10.8.3 and up does not like FW 1.6, giving "error mounting root" and "media not found" errors in verbose boot.

The problem lies with the SATA cable, upgrading it to the 2010 cable fixes the issue and allows the 1.7 Firmware to be used with a 3.0 GBps drive, especially useful if jumpering is not an option (WD drives etc). I'm upgrading mine next week and re-installing FW 1.7.

All the drives that shipped with these MacBooks have SATA 3.0GBps hardware, but Apple flashed them with it's own firmware to limit them to 1.5 GBps. Suspicious? They must have known this problem existed before the machines even started shipping.

-Fiachna

Hi Guys,

I have changed the SATA cable to the 2010 version, I am pleased to say it was a success. So if you have a 3Gig SATA drive and having a problem with either constant hangs with EFI 1.7 or a no Boot Condition with EFI 1.6 and OS X 10.8.3, would recommend upgarding your SATA cable to the 2010 revision. Particularly if you have an SSD or a HD without jumpers to limit link speed to 1.5 GBps

After I replaced the cable it would not boot, giging "Error mounting root" and I heard the HD going to sleep (still EFI 1.6). Repaired the disk in Recovery mode and booted up after that. I downloaded the EFI 1.7 update here: [http://support.apple.com/kb/DL853] because strangely the option to show hidden updates has vanished from the app store 😠. (Feedback submitted to Apple)

I followed the update procedure and afterwards it booted up perfectly!! No hangs or errors showing in verbose boot. I started playing some HD video clips in Final Cut Pro, NO HANG OR BEACHBALL!! Then duplicated a 15GB file, all good! This is the solution I have been waiting for since July 2011 when I installed the 750GB Scorpio Black.

Any problems people may have with SSDs may also be suffering from SSD firmware incompatability, as I know the later Crucial FW for the M4 SSD caused me some problems with other Macs.

My conspiracy is that Foxconn had already produced thousands/millions of these cable assy's early in prodution of the 2009 MacBook Pro and were not robust enough for 3Gigabit controllers/drives and when the fault was discovered, Apple chose to limit the SATA speed in firmware 1.6 and this revision was overlooked/outdated 3yrs when 10.8.3 IOStorage, IOAHCI, etc. kexts were written, probably assuming everybody was on EFI 1.7 by now.

Funny thing is I lectured the guy in my local Apple reseller about this problem when another customer came in with the same problem 😁

Part Numbers: Here is the print on both cables

2009 Model:

APPLE

821-0812-A

©2009 fm 09-47

2010 Model: (iFixit part no. 161-061-1)

FOXCONN 50 12. 02 6

APPLE

821-0989-A

©2010

System Info (Serial ATA):

NVidia MCP79 AHCI:

Vendor: NVidia

Product: MCP79 AHCI

Link Speed: 3 Gigabit

Negotiated Link Speed: 3 Gigabit

Description: AHCI Version 1.20 Supported

WDC WD7500BPKT-75PK4T0:

Capacity: 750.16 GB (750,156,374,016 bytes)

Model: WDC WD7500BPKT-75PK4T0

Revision: 01.01A01

Serial Number: WD-WXE1A7111737

Native Command Queuing: Yes

Queue Depth: 32

Removable Media: No

Detachable Drive: No

BSD Name: disk0

Rotational Rate: 7200

Medium Type: Rotational

Partition Map Type: GPT (GUID Partition Table)

S.M.A.R.T. status: Verified

Volumes:

disk0s1:

Capacity: 209.7 MB (209,715,200 bytes)

BSD Name: disk0s1

Content: EFI

Macintosh HD:

Capacity: 700 GB (699,999,997,952 bytes)

Available: 244.54 GB (244,541,816,832 bytes)

Writable: Yes

File System: Journaled HFS+

BSD Name: disk0s2

Mount Point: /

Content: Apple_HFS

Volume UUID: 2A5236EB-6DEC-3ED3-9D64-5DC605D28005

Recovery HD:

Capacity: 650 MB (650,002,432 bytes)

BSD Name: disk0s3

Content: Apple_Boot

Volume UUID: 1E609E79-890F-354E-952E-9F5E023829B1

HARDWARE:

Hardware Overview:

Model Name: MacBook Pro

Model Identifier: MacBookPro5,4

Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo

Processor Speed: 2.53 GHz

Number of Processors: 1

Total Number of Cores: 2

L2 Cache: 3 MB

Memory: 8 GB

Bus Speed: 1.07 GHz

Boot ROM Version: MBP53.00AC.B03

SMC Version (system): 1.49f2

Serial Number (system): W800*******

Hardware UUID: ***********************************

Sudden Motion Sensor:

State: Enabled

-Fiachna

Message was edited by: fiachnamm Added iFixit part number

Safe boot is now working, before it would boot until where I would expect the login screen but would terminate and shut down as if I pressed the power button. The system boots and shuts down a little quicker now, probably due to higher speed access to the disk cache, improving simultaneous read/writes.

-Fiachna

I have a somewhat similar problem. I have a Intel Based 24- inch, early 2008 iMac [3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo Processor, 4 GB Memory, NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS 512 MB] where the the original 1TB hard drive failed. I replaced it with a WD 2TB drive. I cloned another iMac that was running 10.8.4 onto a firewire 1TB Maxtor Drive and then cloned this drive to the new WD 2TB drive. The WD 2TB drive will not boot; however, the Maxtor 1TB Drive will boot as an external firewire device. Any suggestions?

Well... the 1.5 jumper suggestion works for a Seagate Momentus XT 500G drive. The replacement cable, however, did not. This makes me sad...

My replacement cable was a FOXCONN cable, part number 821-1198-A which would appear to be newer that the one mentioned in this thread. Still no dice.

So Mid-2009 Macbook Pro (MacBookPro5,4), 10.8 with the latest patches, EFI 1.7, new cable, and SD28 for the Momentus firmware is a no go..

Ugh ...

System profiler says 3G is available too ...

Vendor: NVidia

Product: MCP79 AHCI

Link Speed: 3 Gigabit

Negotiated Link Speed: 1.5 Gigabit

Physical Interconnect: SATA

Description: AHCI Version 1.20 Supported

XenoPhage,

As far as I know the cable you installed is the 2011 cable. These were reported to have faulty connectors on them and caused similar problems with SATA 6G disks on the '11 MBP.

I do get the odd beachball/system freeze maybe once every 3/4 days with the '10 spec cable. Lasts about 5 seconds. I'm not even sure if it's the same problem so need to check logs when the next happens.

Any news on the MBP mid 2009 with Mavericks and EFI1.6/1.7?

I have a Seagate, ST500LM011, Seagate Sams 500GB HM501II SP Momentus 5400 SA2 on 10.8.2 and EFI1.6. Updating to 10.8.3 gave issues as mentioned above.

I also have a Seagate Momentus ST95005620AS, 500GB laying around, same issues as HDD I'm using now...

Mavericks behaves exactly the same as 10.8.3 and above. It won't work with EFI 1.6.

Hmm, so updating EFI to 1.7 and hope for the best ...

edit:

and will try the jumper trick at 1.5Gbits ...

http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/193991en

I recommend you upgrade your SATA cable, I'm running EFI 1.7, 3Gbps hard drive, 2010 spec SATA cable and OSX 10.8.5 with no problems. It does beachball every now and then, maybe once a week and I'm using it all the time basically at work etc.

Once that's done you're not messing around changing hard drives and jumpers etc..