Hard drive does not load in 10.4 MacBook

[Durbrow]

My wife's MacBook no longer recognizes its built-in hard drive. When I do a cold restart it simply gives a folder icon with a question mark. I can boot into an external disk drive (10.5) but Disk Utility and the demo version of Drive Genius does not recognize any internal hard drive. Any suggestions?


Specs
MacBook 2 Ghz Intel Core Duo, 1 GB 667 Mhz, running 10.4.x (latest update).

[Durbrow]

Update: I went to System Profiler and clicked on Diagnostic and got this: "Power On Self-Test:

Last Run: 8/25/08 7:31 PM
Result: Failed
Failure type: Memory
Memory slots: DIMM0/BANK 0, DIMM1/BANK 1"

Does this mean that I likely have a memory problem?

[ElDiabloConCaca]

Try re-seating the memory in their slots. It's likely one got jarred loose or was improperly inserted. The RAM slots in the MacBooks are finicky -- it seems to take more force to insert RAM in them than it should, but you should be able to get a good RAM seat by pushing on alternating corners of the RAM.

[Durbrow]

Thanks! Yes I tried this for both chips and they seem firmly in. I also tried to test the memory (Rembr) but could only test 250MB of free memory. No problems. Can you suggest anything else I should do before buying new memory? Thanks again.

[ElDiabloConCaca]

I would next suggest trying each chip individually and seeing what the results are. It could be that the chips just don't like being installed in pairs together, and that neither are bad -- they just don't work well together.

Is this the Apple-supplied memory, or is it 3rd party memory?

[Durbrow]

Apple supplied memory but out of warranty on MacBook. I'll try each chip separately. If one works and one fails I will assume I should get new chips from a Third Party unless Apple will cover it.