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Mid 2010 Model A1278 / 2.4 or 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo processor

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Grey screen of death. Logic Board or Hard Drive cable?

I was working on my Macbook and all of a sudden my computer basically froze. I restarted it and I shows a grey screen. Sometimes I get the apple logo with the bar loading, then sometimes its the circle with the line through it.

I have tried everything. Booted disk utility from recovery. Tried all the view and repair buttons. I can't erase my hard drive, I can't reformat as I get errors. I tried this on two separate HDs. One could be corrupted but I highly doubt both hard drives are. I ran AHT and I got no errors. (EDIT: I did all the disk utility stuff from internet recovery and CD.

I was able to install Yosemite onto an external hard drive and it boots(I'm using it right now). I ran AHT and I got nerrors.

Could this be simple as replacing the HD cable ? Thank you.

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Yes, it does sound like your SATA cable has gone bad. Apple and some 3rd parties has a bad run (I suspect its a bad solder joint on the connector - bad solder). In any case you'll want to replace it.

Also is this the original HD the system came with and/or did you move it over to a dual drive carrier?

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Thanks for the reply. I feel like this has happened to me before but I'm not sure if it was this cable or another but geek squad "fixed" it.

So I have 3 hard drives.

Original 250gb Toshiba hard drive - Came with the macbook

Samsung 1TB internal hard drive(Upgrade, I was using this when it failed. Might be bad)

Seagate 1.5TB external hard drive - This is where I installed Yosemite and it was able to boot off of.

I did not mod any of the HDs in any way.

Does that mean I have to solder something ? This macbook is 4 years old and out of warrenty.

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No, you don't need to solder anything. The reason for the Q on thew HD's was to make sure they weren't the cause of the problem. Sticking with the Toshiba drive that came with the system for now will be best. You do need to replace the SATA cable assembly though first before moving on. Then you can use the external as the boot drive and prep the internal (partition, format & install a fresh OS) or if you want to give it a try fixing the disk.

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I will try these hard drives on a very old macbook I was able to get a hold of to make sure none of these are bad. Then if they aren't, I will buy a new SATA cable and report back what happened. Thanks so much for your insight Dan !

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Be careful here! You want to make sure the system you use to test the drives offers the same SATA port I/O speed: SATA I (1.5 Gb/s), SATA II (3.0 Gb/s) or SATA III (6.0 Gb/s). In your case your system is SATA II (3.0 Gb/s). Using to fast or slow a system for your SATA II drive can give your false errors.

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