My Macbook Pro has been suffering from intermittent fan noises from the right fan for a while. Giving it a bit of slap on the left side of the keyboard often worked to stop the "whir, whir, whir", but that wasn't exactly a good long-term solution.
I had finally come to the conclusion I was going to have to do something about it - probably take it in for a fan replacement. Not an inexpensive repair - the part alone is $50 USD - so who knows what I'd be milked for it here. Plus, these late 2006 MBP's are no picnic to take apart and therefore labor costs are high. However, in one last attempt to see what it might be, I did some Googling and found this:
http://nofilmschool.com/2009/02/how-to-fix...acbook-pro-fan/...and was heartened by the fact that a simple cleaning and lubrication solved the problem for literally dozens of people, all of whom were brave enough to take their MBPs apart by themselves, with the aid of the iFixit guides. Aha! If they can do it, so can I...and while I'm at it, I can upgrade the hard drive, which is a rather inadequate 120GB 5400 RPM Hitachi.
Well, looks like that fan cleaning/HD replacement exercise will be taking place sooner, rather than later.
Today, upon waking from sleep, my Macbook Pro made one feeble beep (according to my son who was the one who woke it up) and then proceeded to make funny scritching noises - the screen remained blank. Whatever the beep was, it doesn't seem to have any significance as it wasn't a cold start when it made the noise and it doesn't correspond to any of Apple's "beep codes" which are all boot-ROM related. Restarted (no beeps) and got the scritchy noises and eventually the old flashing folder with question mark.
It starts up from a system CD fine, but that's it - Disk Utility wouldn't even run from the Leopard DVD and from the original install DVD (10.4) the repair failed - serious errors etc. Can't erase either - more errors. Not a good sign, needless to say.
Disk Warrior gets part way through loading and then the machine just restarts - apparently my original version of DW 4.0, upgraded to 4.1 won't do the trick. (it should work as this is a late 2006 MBP - but it doesn't) However, I also realized that it wouldn't work in any of our newer household Macs (2008 Mac Pro, 2008 iMac, 2009 MacBook) so I called Alsoft for a new DVD of 4.2 ($21). So, if you own DiskWarrior, it might be worthwhile to check that the version you own WILL start up the Macs you currently own. If you've been updating using the downloaded updaters, the CD/DVD you make will NOT start up any more recent Macs than
the original disk you bought. The updates will make DW compatible with the more recent versions of the OS, but not necessarily the HARDWARE. Good to check this out BEFORE you hit an emergency situation. While I'm 99.99% sure that I've got a very dead drive, largely because of the noises it's making, which now include the odd clank, and the fact that the drive cannot be erased, partitioned etc., if the situation isn't so clear, and the drive could be erased but you'd really rather save the data on it, Disk Warrior can often fix the directory errors that are beyond Disk Utility.
It's been an expensive, time-consuming mess of a day so far...
