torx screwdriver needed for macbook hd caddy

Yesterday I left off where I had just bought a new hard drive and an enclosure for the old hard drive (to see if I could salvage any of the old data).  I was able to get the new hard drive working in the computer, which confirmed that the hard drive was the problem.  As an FYI to anyone replacing a Macbook hard drive the hard drive caddy uses a Torx T-8 screw driver.  I found this out AFTER I got home after buying the hard drive I realized I couldn’t put it in until I bought one of these suckers.  At first I didn’t even know the name of the pattern, but now I know any star-shaped pattern on a screw is known as “Torx.”  Once again google came to the rescue.  I called Radio Shack to see if they sold it, but the guy on the phone said “no,”  though he sounded confused when I asked (probably because he didn’t know) … So I went to Home Depot and bought a Torx precision kit for 5 bucks.

Installing the hard drive was straightforward.  I have to give Apple credit for making the swap easy (however, I don’t know if the Torx choice was a good choice).  Anyway, after getting the drive and new OS installed I turned my attention to trying to get the data off the old drive.

HD Dock

I hooked up my old drive to a Thermaltake Black Widow hard drive dock I bought from Best Buy.  It’s pretty handy for plugging in hard drives without the hassle and fuss of a regular enclosure where you have to unscrew and screw things back together.  With this dock you just plug it in like you would an iPod.  I plugged it in and fired up the only disk utility I knew of, Disk Utility.  When I first plugged in the hard drive I got an error message which said the drive isn’t readable (not a good sign).  But, luckily, when I ran Disk Utility the drive showed up.  I clicked the repair disk option and it started doing it’s repair magic.  While it was doing this it was making some god afwul noises–clicking, screetching, beeping.  Good sign, right??  Unfortunately, things went downhill from there…I got an error message which said it couldn’t fix it.  Hmmm…what to do now?

Disk Utility...How could you fail me??

Back to google.  Since things weren’t looking good I decided to look into data recovery companies.  I have heard these companies were expensive, but I wasn’t sure how much exactly.  I looked for a Southern California based company and found one called OC Data Recovery.  According to their website they’ve been in the business since 1999, which means they got to be good…  I called them to just get an idea of prices.  Turns out the minium price is anywhere from $1000 to $1500, but could be even more depending on how severe the problem.  I don’t have that kind of money so I politely declined.  Back to the drawing board.

I then decided to look into other programs that can do data recovery and that’s when I came across a software program called Disk Warrior.   I read their reviews on Amazon and Macworld and it was really positive.  Macworld’s conclusion “Time-honored disk maintenance and repair tool stays essential.”  I decided to give them a try.  I went to their website and purchased the software for a hundred bucks.  I figured it was worth a shot since I was running out of other doors to try.  The purchase, download, and install were straight forward.  The moment of truth had arrive…woudn’t it be able to fix my ailing hard drive.  I ran the program and it looked like it was running, but midway this showed up:

Nuts!  Things were looking hopeless.  On a whim I sent them an email yesterday like the error message told me to do.  This morning when I checked my email I didn’t get a reply.  I decided to call them instead.  I got a voicemail box and left a voice message thinking it was a lost cause.  To my surprise the called me a few hours later.  Jason actually called me and told me to do some extra things… like send him my console and system logs, put in some extra secret codes they have installed in the program, etc..  He started helping me through iChat and we left off with him saying that he might need to rebuild the journal for the hard drive by hand since the Apple Disk Utility might have screwed it up.  I’m not a hundred percent sure what that means, but it means some glimmer of hope.  We’re going to reconnect tomorrow and see if it can work.  My fingers are crossed.

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After it didn’t boot up I started to get worried.  One I had a feeling that my hard drive might be the problem, and two, I hadn’t backed up my data recently.  Then in my mind I was getting pissed at myself because just last month I had bought an external hard drive with the purpose of backing up all my data.  Then even more pissed because I had made a mental note to back up data on my “this week’s to do” list.  But in the midst of all my piss-offtness I figured it would be more productive to figure out what is wrong and see if I could get my computer working again.

This is actually the second time something like this has happened to a Mac product of mine.  My previous mac, a Powerbook g4 15in, had a hard drive failure (which I haven’t replaced) where when I would turn it on it would go to the Apple logo in the beginning and the underneath it would be this swirly thing indicating that things are loading.  However, it would just hang there indefinitely.  At the time that it happened I gave up on trying to fix it and instead bought a used MacBook that I have now.   I needed to upgrade anyway.

Fast forward to right now.  So I knew something might be wrong with the hard drive so I started researching.   Luckily, I had my dad’s computer handy. The two potential culprits I came across were a heat sink problem that caused MacBooks to shut down randomly and the boot up issue I had previously with my Powerbook.   If you just google “MacBook won’t boot”  you’ll get all kinds of results about al the problems MacBooks have.  However, I couldn’t find my exact problem.  So then I googled “Macbook won’t boot no logo”.  I had to sift through some stuff, but eventually came across a forum posting describing the exact problem I was having.  One way someone had suggested testing the problem was to remove the hard drive and see if it boots with a “blinking folder” icon.  If it shows that when the hard drive is out then it probably means the hard drive is broken.  The guy who initially posted the problem said he tried it and the folder showed up and when he replaced the computer with a new hard drive it worked again.  I took out the hard drive (following the pdf directions I found here) and booted it up again, and sure enough that blinking folder came up on my screen.  Hard drive is busted.

Today I bought a new hard drive and I’m seeing if I can get my computer working again…keep you posted…

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