My Black Macbook Crashed, Can I Save It?

Question

My Black Macbook Crashed, Can I Save It?

I'm sure it's something with the hard drive. I was cleaning up my desktop, clicked on a .jpg file to see what it was, the system froze, I did a hard restart, heard a bad noise coming from where the harddrive is and then I got a blue screen.

Details: 2007 Black MacBook; OS X 10.4..., 1GB Ram, 80GB Hard drive space.

In my attempts to repair, upon start up I've seen a flashing folder with a ?, a circle with a strikethrough (like a no-smoking sign), the apple logo, the apple logo with a spinning progress bar, and a blank blue screen.

I have tried a RAM reset by holding down CMD, Option, P, R -- nothing

I have tried inserting my install disc and holdin C -- nothing

I've only been able to get to the command prompt by holding CMD + S once, when I was in the prompt I tried to type fsck -fy, but I had the start up disc in the drive and that was the only volume the command recognized. I tried to eject the disc via the command prompt, but that wasn't successful.

I thought if I could get the start up disc out of the DVD player, then I could retry the fsck -fy option and maybe have some luck. At that point, the power button was not responsive, so I shutdown the computer through the command prompt. I've not been able to get back to the command prompt since. The DVD drive is currently empty. The screen is flashing a ? file folder.

Any suggestions? This is my first post here.

MacBook, Mac OS X (10.4.8), Black MacBook

Posted on May 2, 2013 8:48 PM

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Answer 1

JoeyR

Level 6

8,305 points

May 3, 2013 4:43 AM in response to RaoulDukeLives

Considering the age and the symptoms you've explained, it sounds like your hard drive may have died. It's certainly easy enough to replace:

http://manuals.info.apple.com/en_US/MacBook_13inch_HardDrive_DIY.pdf

Just about any 2.5" SATA drive will work. With your particular model, you need to get a drive no thicker than 9.5mm. That's pretty much a standard, but there are some 12.5mm options out there. Those are too thick and won't fit. Hard drives are relatively inexpensive as well. I probably wouldn't go for an SSD in that particular system considering the age and the specs. I guess you could always get an SSD and if you should get a new machine, you could put it in there as well. The problem being that so many machines are moving in that direction already that whatever you decide to get may already have an SSD. If you boost your system up to 4GB (unfortunately, your model will only recognize about 3.25GB of that) and put an SSD in, it would seem pretty quick for you... It would feel like a machine you might buy today (although the Core 2 Duo might get a little bogged down with heavy tasks). I'm just not sure I would invest all that much in a system that's that old. A standard hard drive is cheap enough to pop in... and 4GB of RAM would certainly help as well.

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