Help: My Mac don't work no more?

dave79 said:

I've recently been having trouble with what I was reliably informed by the chap at my local Apple centre was a hard drive failure. Basically every time I turned the mac on (G4 mirrored doors under OS 10.3) I was presented with a flashing folder alternating an image of the smiley mac logo and a question mark. I've tried to reinstall from disc, however I get as far as selecting my hard drive only there's no hard drive to select from. After buying a new hard drive, I'm no further on and am still unable to select it when I try to install the OS. I'm fairly sure the new hard drive has been physicallt installed fine, however I've run no software or programmes to install it. Am I missing something?

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You have to format the new drive. Choose "Open diskutility" from the menu after you have booted from the installer cd/dvd.

I'm surprised your local Apple store didn't do something about the drive for free. Was it under warranty?

I would take your Mac back to the Apple store you originally went to and tell them to fix it. If they can't fix it, they should pay for whatever needs to be done in order to fix it since it was their fault in the first place.

You should at least try to reformat the disk. Sorry I don't know how to do that, maybe someone else will be able to help

dave79 said:

Thanks for that.

But how do I format the drive once I'm in Disk Utility?

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This deals with zeroing a drive but formating is the same procedure

You cannot erase the startup disk. To zero what is normally the startup disk, start up from a Mac OS X 10.2.3 or later CD, or from a second hard drive.

Note: This refers to a full Mac OS X 10.2.3 or later CD included with a computer, not to the update-only 10.2.3 CD.

If you do not have access to an appropriate CD or to another hard drive, there are other alternatives. If you have a Mac OS 9 CD with a System Folder and a computer that can start up from it, you may use Drive Setup on that CD. When in Drive Setup, choose Functions > Initialization Options to locate the zero all data option. If the computer to be erased can go into target disk mode, you may connect it in that state to another computer and zero it as a non-startup drive.

Steps for zeroing data

These steps assume you have a Mac OS X 10.2.3 or later CD:

1. Insert the Mac OS X CD.
2. Restart the computer.
3. Immediately after the startup sound, press and hold the "C" key to start up from CD.
4. When the Installer screen appears, do not click Continue. Instead, choose Installer > Open Disk Utilities.
5. Select the hard drive to erase.
6. Click the Erase tab. Click the format instead
7. Select the volume format from the Volume Format pop-up menu.
8. Click Options.
9. Select the checkbox for "Zero all data".
10. Click OK.
11. Click Erase.

dave79 said:

Thanks for the help guys.

I've found my new hard drive in the disk utility window. So something is deifinitely better than before as my old hard drive couldn't be found anywhere. All I need to know is how (I'm guessing by using Disk Utility) to make this drive selectable in the install screen? Thanks in advance for any help.

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Once you have formatted it (as above) it should appear as an option for installing from the CD.