A few weeks ago, I somehow fried the internal hard drive in my ancient 17-inch pre-unibody MacBook Pro. It’s a 2006 model running Lion with Intel Core 2 Duo chips. The Best Buy website said that this drive, listed on their site as WD Mainstream (and with the same model number), was compatible with Macs running Lion, Leopard, and Snow Leopard. There was no mention of that on the box.
I took it home, installed it, turned on my Mac, and the computer didn’t recognize it. I got a blank screen and then a flashing folder with a question mark on it. Nothing I’ve tried will get me to Disk Utility to format the drive. I’ve tried rebooting from the original MacBook Pro discs that came with the computer (Tiger, by the way), as well as the installation discs for Leopard and Snow Leopard. I had upgraded to Lion via the internet, but don’t have the disk image file for it. I ordered what I believe to be a replacement installation disc for Lion, but it, too, won’t boot the computer or bring up disc utility.
No instruction manual came with the drive, and I cannot get past blank screens. I wonder if there may be more to the problem.
Disc Utility also wouldn’t let me reformat the original hard drive that was in the computer. It also wouldn’t unmount the boot drive.
I’ve also tried every keyboard shortcut I can (Cmd-R, Option, Shift, Cmd-Option-P-R, Cmd-D, etc.) Nothing has worked and I don’t know what else to try.
