Powerbook Pismo new hard drive

[martinlangley]

Hi there! I'm a unix man recently seen the error of my ways by "acquiring",
(ie being given) an elderly Powerbook Pismo. Its very nice and runs sexy Mac OS X Panther with all sorts of good stuff.

The problem is the hard drive was dodgy when it arrived (that's why it was a freebie) and has now completely failed. No big deal, I've replaced it with a 20 GB used IBM from ebay which connects and formats fine,

I've reached the point in the Panther re-installation where it asks for a target drive and the disk utility sees the newly partitioned disk but it has a red exclamation mark against it (just like a USB stick) to indicate the drive is not bootable (or something). In any event, the OS install will not go any further than this. Anybody know a way around the problem, - I'm sure its something simple but all this Mac stuff is like Greek to an old unix guru with a bone in his leg.

Thanks in advance

 

[McGiord]

m

 

[Grumbles]

I encountered a similar problem when replacing the stock HD with an IDE-to-CompactFlash adapter with card to create a mini SSD for my Pismo. It was able to recognize and format the card in Disk Utility but the installer said it wasn't bootable. I took the jumper off of the adapter to allow it to automatically select master or slave and it worked fine from then on. Maybe your old IBM drive has a similar jumper that you can play with or just remove.

 

[estrides]

I too suggest checking the jumper.