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MacBook problem – is it the hard drive or the logic board?
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My friends macbook just died while using photoshop, and now when it boots it shows the dreaded blinking folder icon. She also claimed she heard it clicking earlier, but I personally haven't heard it (I'm assuming that doesn't go on and off). I brought it home to try some stuff, and first thing was to plug in a clone of my macbook's drive and boot from that, see if I could access it that way. It showed up as a boot option, but when I select it, it shows the apple logo and then a kernel panic. I tried taking out the drive and putting it back in, still nothing, I've even run an apple hardware test and it can't find anything wrong. The hard drive doesn't seem to show up on the disk utility at all, nothing but the install disc. I've tried everything i know short of popping it into my macbook and seeing if it reads, but I'm not sure if it'll backfire and ruing my macbook or not. Oh, and I don't have any adapters or cases for 2.5" SATA drives, so that's out of the question.
According to AppleCare there's a possibility that it's a faulty logic board, and since there's no clicking from the drive I'm hoping thats the case.
So does it look like the hard drive or the logic board?
Also, the macbook is previously used and about 3 years old so no warranty
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It sounds like a hard drive failure. I suggest you try to get as much information off of it before it stops working all together. If she heard it clicking, it is a very good indication it is a bad hard drive. Because the laptop boots and recognizes that it cannot find a system, I dont think it is a logic board failure.
What kind of macbooks are you dealing with? If you have different generations of macbooks that could be causing the kernel panic, especially if the macbooks have different chipsets. Also, macs are not good at booting from usb drives, that could be another one of your problems.
If you want to try to save the data on the drive, get an adapter and try this ‘http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/system_disk_utilities/datarescue3.html’ It works really well on damaged hard drives. I used it on a few damaged hard drives. It takes a few hours and it largely depends on what kind of hard drive damage it is, but if your lucky the read head still works and you can recover the data.
Take it in to apple if it is still under warranty. They should replace the hard drive. I dont know what they will do about the data recovery though. Like I said, the above software works well.