Chosen Solution
Hi, My 13” Unibody Mid-2012 (non-retina, i7 2.9ghz, 8gb ram) started acting up out of the blue a few months ago. Now it usually boots to a white screen, although before it was showing a strange screen that would randomly flicker icons such as the circle with a line through it, the question mark, and the regular apple boot icon. Battery and charger are fine, and the fan spins up no problem. I can get it to boot to recovery mode sometimes, and even got OSX installed from the web once, but it inevitably boots back to white within the next couple of restarts. The HDD is OK, I’m using the old Crucial MX500 SSD I put in there in my PC now and it works fine, and when I plug the old SATA 5400rpm 750gb HDD that it came with into the PC with an external enclosure, it works fine. I got it to recovery mode and tried to format the drive, and it was working for a moment, then hung. Previously it wouldn’t even detect the drive. Is this probably an issue with the HDD cable, or could this be the logic board/ram instead? Another post on this forum has led me to believe it’s the HDD cable, but I wanted to weigh in with you folks first before I pull the trigger.
Thanks!
Among Mac professionals this is a very well know issue. For a while Apple was even replacing the cable for free. I put protection on either side of the cable where in comes onto the optical drive. I also put electrical tape on the floor of the the drive opening to prevent the sometimes rough surface from damaging the cable. MacBook Pro 13" Unibody Mid 2012 Hard Drive Cable Replacement
