Fine Triple-boot and suddenly... no hard drive!

[Cobo]

Hi all!

In my desesperation searching for an answer I discovered this huge forum, it seems the place I've been looking for :).
I'll expose my problem saying beforehand search didn't bring me any result.

Got my Black MacBook (C2D) 2 months ago and triple booted it with OSX, Gentoo Linux and WindowsXP, following the Ubuntu guide (with some little exceptions due to Gentoo configuration). I had it working for
2 weeks and suddenly, while on Linux it stopped leaving no other option than pressing power button. When it restarted... rEFIt didn't appear, only the folder with the question mark. Then... I introduced Apple MacOSX DVD to reinstall it but, surprise! It didn't recognized it had a hard drive! Nor did any Linux installation CD. Anyway... I took the hard drive off the macbook and put it in another computer... It was fine, I could read the partitions and data without problem.
So I took the MacBook to the technical service where they changed the motherboard and the hard drive...

When I got it back... did the same process... and after a week the same happened: macbook frozen, restarted, and the question mark without any system recognizing the hard drive. But I realised that myabe after some hours (or days) of not doing nothing with it... Sometimes it booted normally, rEFIt appeared, and all went fine again, without having done nothing, but of course frozing again... Took it back to Technical Service where they've run all kind of hardware tests and all seems to be find... Just Got my hard drive blanked through target mode and reinstalled OSX.

So... Does anyone have any idea why this could be? I don't know exactly how rEFIt works (tried its doc page without success), if it modifies or how it interacts with the firmware... It's all so strange I don't know what else to do. I bought just to be able to host the 3 OS.

Any hint?

Much appreciated. Thanks to the rEFIt developers for that awesome program and all the people involved in getting Linux to the macbook.

Thanks!

[Gratch]

It sounds like you need to do a process of elimination. Start out with just you're plain old Mac OS running. If you can go two weeks with no problems, set up dual boot, and use Boot Camp (don't install rEFIt) to switch between them. And if after two weeks it's still working, add rEFIt and the third OS back into things. If the Mac just outright can't see the drive, I would expect hardware to be the problem, not any of the individual OSes that you have installed. And rEFIt sits on the Mac partition (usually) so if you can't even get the Mac OS to load up then it's pretty safe to assume the problem is lower-level than rEFIt and most likely a hardware thing. Have you checked to make sure you have whatever the latest firmware is for your MacBook? I don't know that there's any updates available even, but check around on Apple's site.

(Edited for clarity)

[Cobo]

Thanks for answering.

As you said... there's no option but the elimination process. See what I can figure with it, but by now all seems to point to a hardware thing.

From Friday I got it with just MacOSX without problem. I'll see how it goes, and post any possible updates.

Thanks for the interest!

[Cobo]

Well...

After two weeks of using only MacOSX I decided to attack again with a Gentoo installation, so ending up with just MacOSX and Gentoo (the other two times I installed MacOSX, WindowsXP and Gentoo).

Result: after 4-5days of the Gentoo installation, switching between both OSs, suddenly one day it didn't boot up... the same things as always: rEFIt showing a folder and no hard drive detected.
After some hours if has booted up, but I guess till when it'll function and when I am going to be able to boot and when not... It's so strange and confusing this whole thing.
So I discard Windows being the problem... I had that hope :). I focus on a rEFIt or a hardware problem.

With MacOSX it all seems to work pretty well... but when I install another OS some times it works, sometimes it doesn't. Any minimal clue about what this could be?

Thanks a lot!