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Probable hard drive ribbon cable fail

Hi, I am looking for some opinions from people who know about MacBook Pro hardware fails. I have a standard spec mid 2012 MacBook Pro 13in (i5, 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD) that has recently experienced repeated hard drive fails.

This started some months ago. I would get a prohibited sign and no boot when turning it on. It would suddenly work again after a while, either of trying repeatedly or letting it rest then trying, which would give me time to backup most recent data, then I would do a clean install of OS. A few weeks later the same thing would happen again. This happened 3 times I believe.

Finally I decided there must be something wrong with the hard drive and replaced it with a new SSD (also increased RAM). It worked without a snag for over 2 months, then suddenly with no warning the same thing happened again. Except this time it would not boot again after resting, and I could not recover my data (tried making a disk image from disk utility in recovery, as well as using Target Disk mode, to no avail). Luckily the IT people at my workplace managed to help me out and recovered my most important recent data (I don't know what they did). But after that I couldnt even erase the drive and do a clean install: I got a "could not mount disk after erase" error.

I decided to go back to the old hard drive, which had been working right before I replaced it (I also went back to the original RAM). Again, it didn't boot (prohibitory sign). And I got the same error when I tried to format it. This told me that perhaps the drives are not themselves broken and beyond use. I bought a hard drive enclosure and sure enough managed to get the SSD working as an external drive, formatted and installed OS.

So I think the culprit must be the hard drive ribbon cable connected it to the logic board, and I have ordered a replacement.

My question is: can there be ulterior hardware problems causing this fail, beyond the ribbon cable? Which would mean either that the cable fix won't help, or that the problem will just recur? What are possible culprits, and are there ways to diagnose these ulterior issues? (I already tried the hardware diagnosis tool and it gave nothing even when the computer was not booting at all).

I hope my questions make sense, and appreciate any constructive help/advice/opinions.

Hi,

All I can say is that there are a fair number of posts here about failed HD cables, especially of that era. It sounds very much like yours is another case of that.

Thanks for the reply. It's reassuring that this seems to be a common problem. I wonder if what makes it common is a manufacturing flaw in the cable, or some other issue that leads to its degradation. Do you think heat might be to blame? This stuff started to happen not long after I started doing some light gaming on the computer, and this led to some heating up. But I hadn't done any of that for a few weeks before it last broke down.

最後更新：2017-09-08 22:56:32

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