Chosen Solution
I’ve done pretty much it all. Hard drive new in July, but acts like it may be bad. If I can get to disk utility, I run disk repair and usually two red warnings come up “ unused node not erased" and it gives the #. Run repair and it comes up green says disk OK. Go to load OS Snow Leopard, and it freezes up or says can’t be loaded (this is SL install dvd) and while I can’t remember exactly what it says, it means something is wrong with that dvd. I saved the log but it may not be their if when I get back in. Now also I have trouble with super drive as it may not always go on first try. DVD is not that old but I suppose it could be bad, and I can’t get the original DVD to work at all (10.4) I think. This machine will not “see" or read bootable USB flash drives, although it does recognize a HDD dock. I haven’t any good hard drives to try out. I did also change the hard drive cable (new from ifixit). I thought maybe the cable was bad. If I just start it it goes to the blinking ?? Remember, everything has been zapped, reset, erased, verified, and repaired many many times. Originally I changed HDD because of blinking question mark. I was able to load Snow Leopard then went to 10.7 and it worked about a month. Thanks for any help Walt (I just hate to toss it, I kinda like it).
You’er hitting a common issue. The drive you bought is too fast for your system. You see your system only has a SATA I (1.5 Gb/s) interface and the drive you put in is likely a SATA III (6.0 Gb/s) which is way to fast! You’ll need to either get a drive which supports SATA I data rate. Some drives have auto sense technology which will match up with the systems SATA ports I/O data rate. Other drives only run at a fixed speed which is what you have. Finding new 2.5” drives which will work in your system that are larger then 500 GB are getting harder to find. If you can find this SSHD drive you’ll be all set! Seagate ST1000LM014. Seagate has moved on to fixed SATA III drives so make sure you get this exact model. The other direction is to make the big jump to a SSD here Samsung’s current SSD is also auto sense Samsung 860 EVO
