Chosen Solution

I believe that the hard drive on my 15" MacBook Pro has died recently. After a session in which the computer was behaving sluggishly and repeatedly freezing, I shut it down, and attempted to reboot, only to find it stuck at the gray “Apple Screen” for hours on end. Attempts to boot from the Apple back-up discs simply resulted in the computer ejecting them, so I have come to the conclusion that the hard drive is dead (I may be mistaken in this regard, but testimony I’ve read from others facing similar issues seems to suggest that HD failure is the culprit) For what it is worth, the only previous issue I had with this computer was around 3 years ago, when it suffered from a “swollen” battery, which the Apple Store replaced under warranty (which has since expired) As it is no longer under warranty, I would like to acquire a new drive and install it myself, but before I put down the money to do so, I would like to ensure that I purchase the correct, compatible hard drive for this specific computer. It is a 15.4" MacBook Pro, Model No. A1286It was purchased in September 2010, though the box has a 2009 copyright dateThe packaging advertises a “Precision Aluminum Unibody Enclosure” and lists a “500GB 5400-rpm hard drive” under the specifications, as well as a “2.53GHz Intel Core i5 processor” (if this helps identify the particular model) Any and all help is greatly appreciated!

To start with here is the IFIXIT guide to replace your HD: MacBook Pro 15" Unibody Mid 2010 Hard Drive Replacement As far as a replacement drive most 2.5" (9.5mm in height) drives will work in your system. Your choices are a classic HD, a hybrid SSHD (Seagate) which gives you a deep SSD cache with a standard HD, a dual drive (Western Digital), or lastly a SSD which does not have a spinning disk. The biggest factor here is costs. The SSD is the most costly per meg so people tend to get smaller drives to offset the cost, but then you may not enough space to store what you need. If you found you had most of your drive full (500GB) you may want to look at a 750GB or 1TB drive. You do want to leave at least 1/4 to 1/3 of the drive free for the OS to use for swap space. Update (09/04/2015) OK, then your optical drive has a problem here as well. Have you tried cleaning it with a CD/DVD cleaning disk? Do you have a SATA to USB adapter cable? If you do using it with your old drive will allow you to boot up under it, then using it to install a fresh copy of the OS and then migrate your data over as well. The other thing here you could try if you have access to a second Mac is connect the two together using Target Mode and use the other Mac to install the OS. Here you could use the other systems optical drive to install the OS onto your system. The last option here is using a second Mac configure a USB thumb drive (16GB or larger) as a bootable drive and copy over to it the OS installer In any case I would recommend you download from the App Store the current OS installer.