Off the top of my head, I'd think you have a bad SATA cable for the HDD. One of the only parts on those older MacBooks I've never replaced. It could also be your MLB is bad.
I'd take it in and have someone who can actually play around with it diagnose it. If it is the HDD SATA cable, I'd say pay for the repairs. If it's the MLB, just buy a new unit. It's also entirely possible that the cable just came loose or something like that. The MLB end of that cable is really kind of shallow, and it doesn't take a lot of force to pull it free, unlike say the LVDS cable. Sometimes that thing has a piece of the plastic break off in the port before it comes free.
And the fact that it happened after an improper shutdown is really probably just coincidence. It likely would have failed sooner or later regardless.
Macbook 2.1 intel core 2 Duo Boot ROM version MB21.00A5.B07 serial no. W8725048YA2 running OS10.4.11 wont boot up after an improper shut down.
I was deleting a redundant second user account and whilst that user's files were being copied before deleting that account the power was switched off. Starting now gives the flashing question mark icon after the start up chime. This usually means that a start up disc with an operating system cannot be found so I started up from the original instal discs but no hard disc was found by disc utility so I could not reinstall the operating system or reset the start up disc. I have installed a new SATA Western Digital Scorpio Blue hard drive - WD3200BEVT as recommended as being properly compatible but this is not found by disc utility either.
Subsequent observations are listed here:
1. I am still able to use my computer, apparently normally, without an internal hard drive in it and running from an old IDE drive (40GB Toshiba MK4025GAS) in an external USB 2 caddy with OSX 10.4.11 installed on it.
2. I have a simple external case to run SATA hard drives on a USB 2 connection.
Using this:
a) a Western Digital WD1600BUVT hard disc, which I first bought as a replacement but was not recognised installed as an internal drive, is recognised in the external caddy. I was thus able to partition it as GUID as recommended but this still did not enable it to be recognised when installed internally.
b) the SATA Western Digital Scorpio Blue hard drive - WD3200BEVT is not found when in the external caddy.
c) my original hard disc (Seagate Momenu 5400 3 80GB) is not found when in the external caddy.
3. However, here's a puzzle: using a borrowed slightly newer intel macbook (macbook 5.2 serial no.149260224R1 running on OSX 10.5.6) using the USB external caddy disc utility found and partitioned the SATA Western Digital Scorpio Blue disk. However this has still not enabled my computer to recognise it.
(The borrowed computer also does not recognise my original hard drive in the external caddy)
So it looks as though I may have two problems - the original hard drive is damaged; and the ability of the inbuilt hardware and/or software to recognise anything in the internal drive slot is damaged.
I don't understand why the interrupting of a reformatting process should have such a profound effect - can anyone explain?
Any suggestions as to what to do now please to get a working internal drive, and to retrieve data from the original disc?
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