I've never looked at a schematic for the Macbook, but if your third HDD is now bad I think there may be a problem with the power supply or an internal voltage regulator that is frying the electronics of your HDD's.
On 09/17/2014 02:30 PM, Loren M. Lang wrote: > > > I purchased a 2009-era MacBook Pro a year ago, replaced the bad SATA > drive, and promptly put Linux Mint on it. A few months ago, it failed > with what looked like a hard drive issue. I booted up with a Linux > LiveCD and tried to access the hard drive. dmesg reported that a SATA > drive was indeed installed, but unreadable. I tried using hdparm -iI > /dev/sda to retrieve the serial number and received an error back trying > to read any information. It knew that a SATA drive was there but > couldn't seem to acknowledge any commands so it appears that the logic > board failed and it was not a mechanical error. > > I filed an RMA with > Western Digital and had my under-warranty hard drive "promptly" replaced > in a couple weeks. I installed the drive only to discover it had the > exact same error as the previous drive. I checked the serial number on > the label and it was indeed different than the one I sent in for the > RMA. As another test, I tried that hard drive in a USB 3.0 enclosure on > a separate Linux computer and found that the hard drive was indeed the > one spewing those error messages. > > I then found a third, spare hard > drive that I first tested in my USB 3.0 enclosure. It worked so I > installed it in my MacBook Pro and booted up my LiveCD yet again. Sure > enough, it had the same error and could not even report it's serial > number to me. I powered down and moved the spare hard drive back to the > enclosure and found that that hard drive is now dead as well. It appears > that the real issue is with my MacBook Pro and it's killing my hard > drives. I'm assuming the power supply voltages are out of spec so I > pulled out my voltmeter. Measuring the SATA power connector with the > dead hard drive attached and Mac powered on, I found 5V on the 5V supply > lines and no voltage on the 12V or 3.3V lines. No indication of > something that might kill a logic board, but I would expect to see 12V > on the supply. What's even more odd, if the issue is with the power > supply, I would expect it to also affect other SATA devices, at a > minimum, but yet, I can completely boot up with a LiveCD on the SATA DVD > drive with no issues. > > I'm at a loss as what to do next to fix my poor > MacBook Pro. My Mac friends keep telling me to pull out AppleCare and > get it fixed right, but that's a lot of money to fix what's probably > just a bad solder joint. > _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug