About four days ago I upgraded the hard disk in my MacBook Pro (the 2009 summer model, unibody with SD card). I took out the 320GB 5400 RPM Fujitsu that it came with, and added a 320GB 7200 RPM Hitachi (Travelstar 7K320-320). After restoring my SuperDuper clone, all worked perfectly, and I had a nice little speed boost.
This morning I went to upgrade my firmware as per the software update, and BAM, my laptop now failed to boot. I did the whole verbose-hold-down-Command-V-when-powering-on to get a verbose dump of what was going on. Eventually, I get this gem: Failed to issue COM RESET successfully after 3 attempts. Failing…
Bummer.
I found only one thread on the Apple Discussion Forum to help me out with this particular error, but it looks like there are several people who are having the same failure to boot or random data errors after updating the firmware, who have installed after market drives [here, here]. There are other reports surfacing on the web about what appears to be the same issue.
So what did I do? Well I yanked my shiny new Hitachi drive out, and threw the Fujitsu drive back in, and we booted fine. Yuck.
I feel your pain, the 7200rpm drive would’ve kicked ass …