New Internal Hard Drive Not Mounting in black Macbook (1st Gen): Please help ASAP!!!

[timbo3]

I have a 1st generation Macbook laptop. I swapped out the original 80GB HD & installed a larger 320GB internal HD I recently bought on Ebay. At 1st, everything seemed ok, the hard drive mounted ok and I went ahead and proceeded to 1st partition the drive into 4 80GB separate partitions, with a plan to install Snow Leopard on one of the partitions, have 1 for room for a backup drive, and the other 2 partitions would host Windows 7 & possibly Linux, via (bootcamp). After experiencing some frustration with the installation of Snow Leopard, it appeared everything was ok, so then I went ahead and migrated my entire original 80GB mac factory HD over into 1 of my partitions. Everything seemed to go quite smoothly up to this point. However, soon afterwards, my HD somehow was no longer mounting! It still has not mounted ever since this time. I have tried taking the HD out and swapping it with the old one and it still will not mount. However, the original hard drive mounts right away without any issues. My entire livelihood is essentially thru my computer as an online grad student, so I went out to Frys Electronics & purchased a WD Scorpion Blue 500 GB HD after experiencing all of these issues. The new HD is working flawlessly. However, my issue and question is, what can anyone with technical knowledge suggest I do to completely erase the other non-mounting HD? I plan to send the non-mounting HD back for reimbursement to the Ebay seller soon. I'm concerned because, as I previously mentioned up above, this HD still potentially is holding all of my personal information from my previous drive I had for years installed into the macbook. I have searched far and wide online for any answers to this issue and would appreciate any help in this matter. Please help, Mac Techies!!!! Please help this learning Mac Techie JR & sorry for the long post, but I feel like it's better to get out all of the info 1st, right away!!!!

 

[DewGuy1999]

As to the original problem, when you were partitioning the hard drive, did you first format it as "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" with a GUID Partition Table (GPT)?

As to the second problem, if you put the problem hard drive back in your MacBook, you should be able to boot from an OS X CD/DVD and erase the problem hard drive thus removing all you data.

 

[timbo3]

Hi DewGuy999 & thanks for your quick response back to me

Yes, in answering your 1st question, I did make sure that I set it up the way you mentioned, however, since I had originally intended to run Snow Leopard on the primary hard drive, then have another GUID partition as a general backup drive, and the other 2 partitions were partitioned though under the Fat32 format specifically with a plan to install Windows & Linux. So, basically the primary (top) & 2nd partitions were GUID formatted. Does this properly answer your 1st question? Please let me know, for me to be clear

Also, I just remembered another thing that might help to diagnose the issues I'm having hopefully, I was installing Snow Leopard, upgrading from Leopard and had installed it using a .DMG image using the "Restore" in Disc Utilities, so I did not use an actual physical install CD to install Snow Leopard, if this makes any difference, please let me know. Hopefully this info helps.

Now, in trying to gain a better understanding of the last suggestion, do you or anyone else believe that my DMG disc would do the trick? And furthermore, how would I actually go about actually installing the OS again if the actual Internal Hard drive is not mounting in the 1st place, which brings me back to my original issue? I'm just desperately trying to seek out the best ways to go about dealing with this issue & thanks in advance to anyone & everyone who helps me with any possibly viable suggestions which can help me.

 

[DewGuy1999]

Wow! That's way beyond my level of experience. I didn't know that you could have a boot disc with multiple formats on it without using something like Boot Camp.

Are you say that you don't have any physical OS X install discs?

 

[timbo3]

Wow! That's way beyond my level of experience. I didn't know that you could have a boot disc with multiple formats on it without using something like Boot Camp.

Are you say that you don't have any physical OS X install discs?

Yep. However, I am still having the issue of not being able to access the old hard drive that is not mounting anywhere when I plug it in. I dont really know what to do and am really frustrated at this point. Thank God I don't need the info, however, I just wanna make sure the info is unretrievable before I send the old drive back in to the seller.

You have any suggestions or anyone else have any for me, for that matter?

Thanks in advance.

 

[oaacosta]

Did this issue finally get resolved? I have the same thing going on.