iBook G3 12" HD

Hate to ask the obvious....but have you actually installed OS X on your new hard drive?

According to your first post, you still have the original grey restore disks for your Mac? If so, you should be able to install OS X on the new hard drive by booting with the CD/DVD. Have you tried this?

Is the Tiger disk an upgrade disk? It should say on the disk itself. If it is, it is probably expecting to find Panther on the hard drive.

Also, could you say which HD is in your iBook right now? And do you have an external HD enclosure or caddy that you could put the other drive into?

Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but I can't think at the moment why the behaviour should be different if you're issuing the same command to boot from the CD. Let me have a think/sleep and see if someone in a different time zone chips in in the mean time........

have you jumpered the new harddrive as MASTER ? i ask as most come as cable select and that wont work the ibook will not recognise a harddrive if its cable select the hardrive will spin around in cable select but , for the ibook there i no harddrive inside then

usually there is a label on top that tells you where the jumper (on some even 2) have to be set to make it master

another question where did you buy the harddrive , i ask for a reason as some harddrives meant for pc which had been in one before wont work on Mac because of some low level formating which the mac cant read or make any use of

and some hardrive are master if there is no jumper but others need a jumper to be master every manufacutrer has its own plan and sometimes even the same manufacturer change their jumper setting

hmm tricky now my ibook has a jumper set , but its a g4

but now i read that normally they should not need one

one second leave the new drive where it is inside the ibook , now reset PRAM as thats where the startup disc is stored and its location

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1379

sorry if i ask again
so your screen works perfectly fine when you put in the old harddrive and it boots
but the screen doesn't come on when you put in the new harddrive am i right here ?
as i never experienced something like that before
another thing
what happens with the new harddrive in when you press

Command + Option (alt) + O + F
(should open the open firmware and be displayed on the screen )

You got ATA conflict with new HDD most probably. Check jumper settings for new and original HDD. It's possible that "no jumper" means (for example) Master for old and Slave for new one. There is only one ATA channel in iBooks and Master/Slave things are important.

so if the iBook turns on normal with desktop on the screen with the old harddrive ,
and the screen stays dark with the new harddrive and if the jumper settings are as they are supposed to be
then i take a guess and say the new harddrive came DOA or it was never meant for the iBook , but i am not sure about that because its a long long time ago i came across a 20gb p-ata 2.5"
i googeled a bit and came across that little bit in wiki , but that is now a extremely wild guess with that


Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE), later renamed to ATA, with the alias P-ATA ("parallel ATA") retroactively added upon introduction of the new variant Serial ATA. The original name reflected the innovative integration of HDD controller with HDD itself, which was not found in earlier disks. Moving the HDD controller from the interface card to the disk drive helped to standardize interfaces, and to reduce the cost and complexity. The 40 pin IDE/ATA connection transfers 16 bits of data at a time on the data cable. The data cable was originally 40 conductor, but later higher speed requirements for data transfer to and from the hard drive led to an "ultra DMA" mode, known as UDMA. Progressively faster versions of this standard ultimately added the requirement for an 80 conductor variant of the same cable; where half of the conductors provides grounding necessary for enhanced high-speed signal quality by reducing cross talk. The interface for 80 conductor only has 39 pins, the missing pin acting as a key to prevent incorrect insertion of the connector to an incompatible socket, a common cause of disk and controller damage.

that is really only a wild wild wild guess that it is one of the earlier harddrives or a doa , but would explain why your ibook is not booting with it as the open firmware looks first for the harddrive and then for the screen if i am informed right so it does not get to the screen and stops booting at that point

i am totally now and could be totally on the wrong path and there is a simple solution to the problem and i just cant see the forest because of all the trees