Dead HDD or ?
Hello,I will preface this by asking for patience as I may word things wrong or not know as much as most folks do on this forum.
Okay, here goes...
I purchased a 15" 2009 MBP from an auction site knowing that it did not have a hard drive. My son has a 13" 2010 MBP that suffered liquid damage on the logic board, however has still been working but with an external monitor. Prior to bidding on the the 15" MBP I did some research and determined that these two MBP's came with the same Toshiba HDD, so I placed my bid and ended up winning.
HDD Specs: Toshiba MK2556GSYF, HDD2E73 SATA 250GB 2.5" 7200RPM, FW: LJ001D
When the 15" MBP arrived, my husband and I swapped the HDD and it was working fine. As soon as the next day, it started "misbehavin" and causing grief, specifically random shut downs. I backed up the files on the drive and decided to erase it as my son had been using it for playing Minecraft,, Robox, etc. and downloaded a lot of files, so I thought it would be a good idea to start clean.
I had already downloaded the El Capitan installer onto a USB flash drive as that was the OS version that was installed on that HDD previously. I started the MBP in Disk Utility and selected the option to install OS X. I came up against an error during install that displayed, "An error occurred while extracting files from the package Essentials.pkg." I tried the install two more times with the same result. Thinking something may be wrong with the installer, I deleted the installer from my iMac, re-downloaded it to my iMac and to a USB flash drive. Tried the install again on the MBP and got the same error message.
I decided that maybe I would have better luck installing Snow Leopard to the MBP so I pulled out the flash drive that I have the installer for Snow Leopard on and attempted that install, which gets me to the screen where I select a language; I select English, hit enter or the arrow button to move to the next option, then the computer just shuts down completely. I now can't start up Disk Utility either.
I should point out that I did do First Aid and did verify the disk in Disk Utility. There was an error, but when I ran it again, the error had been corrected. Also, when I looked at the "info" for the drive, it said verified. I apologize for not having specific notes or pictures of what happened, but I know I saw that it said "No" under bootable.
I would like to know if this is something that can be fixed or if my drive is dead. I can't take it to the Genius Bar any time soon as the closest one is three hours away.
Thanks in advance for any guidance I am able to get from this forum.
I have been an Apple user since 1979... Apple donated Lisa's to our elementary school as a result of moving into our neighborhood (at the end of my street) when I was a child. I have never had to go to such lengths to get my Apple computers up and running as I have with Windows computers that I have owned; I eventually removed Windows computers out of my home from being so disappointed in not only their systems, but their customer service as well.
MacBook Pro
