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Hi everyone The laptop is a MacBook Pro 15", 2.16 GHz Core Duo, Model A1150. It has been given to me without hard drive in it and I have no clue about what it went through. The laptop works perfectly booting from Ubuntu cd. I have two hard drives to try with, both “Western Digital” and both 160 gb: Hard Drive 1: WD1600BEKT, brand new guaranteed by the ebay seller to be specifically compatible with my MacBook Pro A1150; Hard Drive 2: WD1600BEVT, pretty old. I’ve installed both drives (one per time obviously) in a Dell Inspiron 1525, installed Ubuntu OS and both drives worked perfectly. Now I install the drives in the MacBook, and every time I do so I call one SMC reset and three PRAM resets. 50% of the times the drive is detected and a faulty Ubuntu OS is loaded. 50% of the times the drive is not seen at all and I get the question mark folder. Same goes when I boot the pc from Ubuntu cd, 50% of the times the hard drive is shown on “Disks” application, 50% it doesn’t appear. When “Disks” shows the hard drive, still the hard drive is not really accessible, only one time out of dozens SMART data was available. Time to install Ubuntu, or at least try: 50% of the times the hard drive is not detected and installation cannot be initiated; 50% of the times the hard drive is detected, the installation seems to be started but after few seconds I get “Input/output error during read on /dev/sda” I’ve replaced the hard drive cable and after that I went through the exact same experiences. I’ve set the hard drives jumper setting to SSC first, RPS after and still no luck. Any help will be highly appreciated. Thanks in advance

OK lets first look at the specs of your MacBook Pro: MacBook Pro 15" Core Duo 2.16 GHz. Now lets look at the spec sheets for the two HD’s you have: Scorpio Black - WD1600BEKTScorpio Blue - WD1600BEVT Now looking at the MacBook Standard Hard Drive section we see the system can only support a SATA I (1.5 Gb/s) drive. Now looking at the Scorpio Black sheet we see the HD Interface is SATA II (3.0 Gb/s) and if we look at the Scorpio Blue we see it also runs at SATA II (3.0 Gb/s). Both of these drive will not work reliably in your system - Sorry ;-{ OK, lets see if we can find a drive that will work. What if we can also increase the performance as well here (better than either of the two drives you listed). I happen to like the Seagate SSHD units we find them very reliable and offer better performance than a straight HD. Here’s the link to explain about the drives: Seagate SSHD and here is the link to the spec sheet: Seagate Laptop SSHD Spec sheet. Now looking at this sheet location this line SATA Transfer Rates Supported (Gb/s) Here we can see the following: 6.0/3.0/1.5. So this drive unlike the WD is auto SATA speed sensing matching to the systems SATA ports I/O speed. Which makes it a very workable drive for you! Two more points here: You still need to make sure your systems firmware is upto date. Follow this Apple TN on how to check and update: EFI and SMC firmware updates for Intel-based Macs I do strongly recommend getting a FireWire external HD case to hold one of your Western Digital drives so you have a backup drive. If you can’t return it. In any case if you have anything important on it you do want to wipe if before returning the drive.

The first thing I would do is to stop trying to use systems other than Macs. Get a retail version of OS X 10.6 and boot from it. Use Disk Utilities to format the drives GUID so the Mac can read and write to them, Format as Apple Extended. I would also zero out the drives at this time to map out eliminate any bad block or sectors. Now install the operating system and then download and run the updates to 10.6.8. If all this works well you can now download 10.7 and update it to 10.7.5.

A correction for Mayer: A Core Duo MBP, like all 32-bit Mac/Intel systems, has 10.6.8 as its OS X ceiling. Claudio, you should be able to install Ubuntu (or other Linux distributions) as a boot OS, although OS X 10.6/Snow Leopard is a lot easier to get and install. The key thing to remember when installing a Linux distro is that Macintoshes are not generic Wintel boxes, no matter what outsiders believe. Even when the chipsets and component numbers match the ones from Intel and component manufacturers, Apple often does special firmware. And Apple is a big enough customer that they often force the OEMs to modify the stock components to perform to Apple’s specifications. TL; DR version? Don’t expect a Linux distro installed on a non-Apple machine to boot an Apple machine; non-Mac installs are unlikely to include the drivers Mac hardware will need. A better strategy is to download a Linux install disk image compatible with your Mac hardware, burn it to an optical disk, boot off the disk and then install. Another technique is to install OSX first, then use Apple’s BootCamp utility to create a Linux partition for dual booting. The Ubuntu site has a tutorial for installation on a MacBook Pro1,1 (Core Duo). Their recommendation, like mine, assumes that you’ve already installed OS X and all the firmware updates before attempting the Linux install.

Problems are wrong drives. The WD1600BEKT is a SATA II drive and you have a SATA I box you’re trying to use it on. If it clames to automagically detect and adjust throughput speed it’s not doing it (most SATA revs are backward compatible one version -looks like you’ve found a couple of exceptions) if possible, and you know or find out how, you’d have to manually jumper them down to SATA I. I don’t know what jumpers to use so I have no idea if you’re in the ball park. The same thing seems to be going on with the WD1600BEVT. It too appears to be a SATA II drive. Any OS uses VMEM and SWAP files - if there’s problems accessing the drive then freezing and errors would be a normal result. If this answer is acceptable please remember to return and mark it accepted.

You can use SATA 3 drives in a SATA 1 or SATA 2 machine, ignore advice claiming otherwise. You can plug a top of the line new SATA 3 SSD into an old piece of junk A1150 and it will function just fine from modern Crucial SSDs to Seagate 1 TB SSHDs to 320 GB WD blacks. I do it everyday. I would be bankrupt or too busy fighting chargebacks to post here if this were not possible. Your issue is most likely related to one of the following. a) Those drives are developing bad sectors. Can you even buy 160 GB drives anymore? How old is that thing?! Old enough to be DEAD is the right answer. And for !&&*’s sake, you bought it on EBAY!!! and they TOLD you it was new… so it must be, right? ;) eBay is the WORST place to unintentionally buy BROKEN CRAP!!! hard drives in laptops have an average shelf life of 3 years before failing or starting to kick the bucket. ANYTHING PRODUCED that is 160 GB is already outside that timeframe. b) Your X1600 chipset is failing. They are all dead by now, there are no new ones so I cannot even recommend you TRY replacing the GPU on that. Even if you were able to find a new GPU for that thing, the Samsung VRAM will die while you try to replace it, so absolutely no point to even try. c) The drive cable is bad. Highly unlikely, the only ones that die without reason are the 13" Unibody cables. Do this. Buy a NEW drive from NEWEGG, NOT EBAY!!!!!!!! SATA, 2.5" - this is all that matters. Use a WORKING MACHINE to put 10.6 snow leopard on this drive - any other Macbook Pro from 2006 to 2011 will work fine for this(but core i models will only boot from 10.6.8, not 10.6.3). Then place that drive into your A1150. If it works, you know the issue was you have bad installation media or a bad drive. if this does not work, it’s time to toss that A1150 in the bin. But really, if ANY X1600 based machine isn’t at least a little dead by now, I will be very surprised. Those chipsets were junk when they were new, and do keep in mind that at this point in time, they are nine years old.