Hard drive was removed while power was on
My wife's MacBook Pro mid-2010 had its hard drive removed by, let's say, a person less than qualified to do so, for reasons not relevant to the question. When I opened the case to "assess the damage" and to get an idea of what I had to do to replace the drive, I inadvertently tried to remove the wrong bracket, the one closer to the front, by mistake. To my dismay, I noticed that the white bar LED, hidden behind the bracket, was on. There's a circuit board loosely attached to the LED behind the bracket. I hope I didn't damage that. I had wrongly assumed that the, ah, bozo would have turned the unit off, or more correctly, never turned it on, before removing the drive. I also wrongly assumed that the unit would not be on in the first place, with the drive missing. Apparently it can still be turned on (for hardware tests?). I also thought it would have auto-shut long since the 4 days ago that the drive was removed.The desktop and dock were visible when I opened the cover.
My question is, could removing the drive while the unit was powered on have done serious damage? Is it possible that the unit turned on AFTER the drive was removed with the power off?
Also, the 4 mounting (torx?) screws from the drive are missing. Do most drives come with these or can I get some from here when I order a new drive?
Another anomaly, there were only 2 long screws at the back of the case instead of the 3 that are shown in the manual. The third one is a short screw and the threads are all the way to the top surface of the cover so it appears to be intentional. What's up with that?
Update
Conclusion
I installed a new 750 GB 7200 rpm SATA II WD Scorpio Black WD7500BPKT drive. I formatted the drive using Disk Utilities and installed OS X and default apps from supplied discs. I updated OS X to version 10.6.7 and all seems to be working well. I ran the Apple Hardware Test and, after almost an hour, got the coveted results: "No trouble found." WHEW! So maybe the guy wasn't a total half-wit. ;) Thanks all for your help. I hope others will find this first-hand information useful.
Questa è una buona domanda?