Problem:
Macbook pro 2.53 GHz (unibody 15 inch, late 2009, macbook pro5,4) freezes and beachballs after upgrading to a larger harddrive.
The solution:
Force the harddrive to use SATA1, not SATA2. Put a jumper on the harddrive, locking it down to use the older SATA standard even if the drive and the computer handles SATA2 officially. This avoids the software bug in Mac Os X causing the problem.
The details:
I had a lot of problem with upgrading the hard drive from 250 GB to 750GB on my macbook pro 2.53 GHz (late 2009, macbookpro5,4). I got a lot of beachballing, freezes etc.. In fact, I had to install to a usb drive and then clone the installation. Running Ubuntu on the computer was no problem at all, which excluded hardware problem. Also, memtest86+ passed without remarks.
I contacted the store I bought the computer from, Apple support and two firms specialized in repairing Apple computers. None of them had ever heard of such a problem. In fact, they used hard drives of the same manufacturer when they upgraded clients computers.
Googling revealed that other users also had problems. Suggested solutions included disabling the shock sensor, adjusting the power scheme or downgrading the efi firmware. The last solution needs installing an unsupported file from some unknown source, which I am not willing to do.
The first two solutions made the situation better, but not good enough.
It turned out the problem is that this particular hardware version does not work with SATA2 and Mac OS X. The problem should really be fixed in Mac Os X, but Apple does not want to do that.
The support for SATA2 was added with the newer firmware, which unfortunately brings the bad behaviour.
Therefore, one has to somehow force the hard drive into using SATA1. Luckily, one can set a jumper on the hard drive which does just this. Problem solved.
The computer now works brilliant. Hopefully someone will google the same symptom, find this page and solve their problem instead of wasting time like I did!
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