MacBook Pro :: It Keeps Breaking Hard Disks

MBP Mid 2009

Lion

8GB Ram

1TB HDD 

The problem started with my MBP freezing about once per day (sometimes spinning wheel, sometimes complete unresponsiveness). After doing a hard reset, I would usually be given the grey screen with stop sign, and the machine wouldn't boot. Resetting the PRAM would fix this, and it would boot OK. This was going on for a few weeks (I did disk checks which came back fine).

Then a couple of days ago the machine froze (unresponsive), I did a hard reset but just got the chime and grey screen - no Apple logo, no spinning wheel, no stop sign. Nothing. I did PRAM and SMC resets, but still nothing. I tried booting safe, safe verbose, hardware test, single user - nothing would work; just chime and blank grey screen. So I thought my OS installation had died.But when I tried to boot to the Lion DVD, still nothing - grey screen, the DVD would spin up, then spin down to a stop. I thought it might me faulty RAM, but not having any others to try I just swapped the two pieces over. Nothing. 

Then I plugged my external 500GB HDD in to the USB (which was the machine's original internal HDD) and suddenly the Lion DVD would boot. So, the internal 1TB was dead. I put the 500GB back inside, booted Lion DVD successfully, formatted the HDD and started the Lion install. This failed with an error message 'the support files can't be copied - restart to try again'. So I restarted and in disk utility it said the HDD S.M.A.R.T was failing and it had a serious fault which could not be fixed and needs to be replaced. The 500GB disk was working fine and had had very little use since being replaced by the 1TB in January this year (the 1TB was brand new in January). So it seems odd that the both decided to fail one day after each other.

Info:MacBookPro