Originally Posted By: matthew_k
Just remove the suspect hard drive and try booting from a Leopard DVD. SATA doesn't have master/slave relationships, so it seems unlikely that one's affecting the other, but anything's possible.


Pretty sure the white macbook has a PATA DVD drive (and SATA HDD). At least that's what the last-gen mbp had in it... it does sound like a connector gone adrift though.

Do you get the whirr-whirr noise from the optical drive when the mac comes out of sleep?