Unable to Partition

[Brian Cruikshank]

Hey all, any help would be greatly appreciated.
My mid 2009 macbook pro froze last week, and I was unable to force quit any applications or do anything to it, so I shut it down by holding down the power button. I rebooted in recovery mode and ran disk utility (repair) on the hard drive, which told me that it could not be repaired.
I am currently booting from an external hard drive that I partitioned to be used as my start-up disk, but I want to be able to boot from a more secure source, so I bought a 500GB Seagate SATA Internal Hard Drive.
I booted in recovery and disk utility recognized that the internal drive was there, but I was unable to zero erase the drive or partition it. I received an error message that said "unable to write to the last block of the device". I tried formatting it for MS-DOS but this failed as well.
I wanted to see if it was a problem with the SATA cable, so I took out the hard drive and straightened out the cable. Now disk utility does not even recognize the hard drive. Is this more likely a problem with the hard drive or cable and how should I try to fix this?

Thanks!

 

[oldscribe]

Hi and welcome,

I wanted to see if it was a problem with the SATA cable

Quit possibly, but personally I would book a GB appointment and have the Apple techs check it out.

 

[Spawn_Dooley]

I think* that error message could be for a range of different reasons … with no on-fix-fits-all but there are things you could try:

1. Take/send the drive back to the manufacturer for a replacement
2. Put the 500GB Seagate drive in an enclosure and connect it to another computer, Win or Mac and see if you can format the drive.​

If you are successful, then the drive might be accepted by your MacBook Pro & you can reformat it.