MacBook White 2006 HDD upgrade issue

[Raf99]

First I should state that I have advanced knowledge in the IT world; 15 years and counting. But I need some help here on a MacBook white HDD upgrade, and I was hoping someone may have some answers that will help me out. I've been reading for more than 3 hours now, trying to solve this issue.

Replacing the HDD on a 2006 MacBook White unibody (had a 80GB 5400rpm Sata) with a 500GB WD 7200rpm Sata2 HDD.

The setup would not see the HDD. The disk utility does see the HDD but says the unit is 3.6TB. An attempt to partition or erase the drive gives an error "input/output error".

I plugged the drive up to a external USB connection and could install Mac OS X (default CD that came with the system). It boots up fine. But if I put the HDD back in the system (internally) I just get a "cannot be found" picture (circle with a line through it).

I've read a lot of things over the hours....
- I read of trying the external USB connection, then pop it back in and it will work > this half worked.
- I read that the unit has a limit of 5400rpm, but others have gotten 7200rpm drives to work. Personally I've never heard of a rpm limitation with hardware as all Sata specs are backwards compatible.
- I read that Snow Leopard OS was needed to complete the job. (have not tried this yet, need a dual layer DVD-R)

Things I am currently trying...
- Acronis Disk Image software = cloning the old HDD to the new HDD (will take hours).
- Using the Disk Utility to partition the drive in two. (< this failed, same input/output error message)


If anyone has any experience on the topic and can shed some light on this, maybe some workarounds I would really appreciate it. Thanks

[Leung]

I'm not too familiar with Mac computers but on a typical laptop or Windows desktop, i would have checked to see if i had the most current BIOS trying to install a larger hard drive.

[Raf99]

Back in the day (in a Windows environment), this situation did occur. I believe once 1TB HDDs appeared on the market several motherboards had a capacity limitation and thus a BIOS update was required. The fact that it sees this drive as a 3.6T implies its reading the C/H/S wrong and is incorrectly determining the size of the drive. Whether this is a hardware limitation or software limitation I cannot figure out.

So there's no documentation on the apple website/FAQ/community forum that states only a 5400rpm drive can be used or anything along these lines.
There's no documentation on the WD website to imply that this drive cannot be used with older MacOS X or a older model of Mac.

There is plenty of docs telling me how to partition and format the drive :S

And if I boot up with the old HDD, plug the new 500GB HDD in via USB, it reads the drive as 500GB. Seems more like a software issue now...

[Raf99]

I'm not too familiar with Mac computers but on a typical laptop or Windows desktop, i would have checked to see if i had the most current BIOS trying to install a larger hard drive.

Thanks, looking into updating/checking the EFI on it now.

[Raf99]

EFI was a no go. & the more i read, the more this points to being a software issue. Going to try Leopard soon and see if this works.

[Raf99]

For the record installing Mac OS Snow Leopard 10.6.7 fixed this issue. The older Mac OS X 10.4.8 was the culprit.

[stevediraddo]

lol, "it just works"

[C91BLX7]

Upgrade a mac? whats this?

[Jarrett]

Upgrade a mac? whats this?

I giggled.


What you may have been experiencing was a capacity limitation in Mac OSX 10.4. I have an old G4 Cube that I modified to hell and back and it has a hard drive limitation of 128GB that it will see. It required a firmware upgrade to see the 250GB drive that's in there now. I eventually put Leopard on it (pain in the ass on that old G4, but it's dual G4s now) and the issue was not present again in the install. I guess Apple just thought that no one would ever need that much space on those machines.