Hard drive or SATA cable fried?
Hi all,
Let me take you through my day.
This morning, I start up my MacBook Pro, MD101N/A, Mid-2012, to see that there is a beta update (I'm a public beta tester) to add Photos to OS X. I download the update, have breakfast, and come back upstairs to see it is not done installing yet (five more minutes). I'm in a rush so close the computer and take it to work. I open it up at work and the installation finishes in about ten minutes, after which it says the Mac will be optimising for some time and hence performance and battery may be affected. No problem. Works perfectly all day - Safari, Pages - you name it. Pack it up in my backpack, someone bumps in to me (pretty hard) as I walk toward my car. Laptop is closed to hard drive should be asleep - plus metal casing and backpack protection is strong enough?
Get home, fire it up, everything works fine. Open up Safari, Pages and an 1080p video on QuickTime. It freezes while I check what WiFi network I'm on, doesn't respond to anything (including Force Quit keyboard prompt). Force shut down, start back up, and the flashing folder with question mark appears. Open up Apple Hardware Test, no faults (even the longer test). Start it in Safe Mode - no help. Start it in Recovery mode, attempt to go to a Time Machine backup - no destination drive found. Same thing for clean reinstall. Go to Disk Utility; no disk recognised.
One year ago (minus four days) an Apple Store in the Netherlands replaced my SATA cable after I encountered the exact same problem. I will not be able to visit an Apple Store in the next three months as I'm in Kenya.
Can anyone give advice as to what actions to undertake? All files are backed up in my Time Capsule - but I do hope this is software and not hardware.
Cheers in advance.
MacBook Pro (13-inch Mid 2012), OS X Yosemite (10.10.2)