Repairing Macbook - not too sure.

[stradle]

Hi, I managed to purchase a very cheap, damaged Macbook (not sure of which generation, but it has the magnetic lid latch, but reckon its about 5-6 years old).
It was missing memory, hard drive and was apparently faulty - didnt have much information about what he thought the fault was.

I got 2Gb memory and also a 640Gb hard drive and put that in.
When I turn it on, screen flashes, drive spins up, screen goes dark and then a folder with a question mark appears (very difficult to see it as if screen brightness is right down)

After that, it just sits there, I have tried putting the snow leopard disk in to start copying over, installing the operating system, but I cannot get past the question mark folder dark image.

I am quite new to Mac's and thought this was a cheap way to start, but not sure how to get any further.
I have read a few forum posts about the folder and it seems it is down to a lot of things including hardware, some of the fixes are keyboard shortcuts which dont seem to actually work.

If anyone has any ideas on how to get any further, I would appreciate your help, also any more information that you need I will let you know.

Thanks.

 

[Detrius]

Sounds like the backlight is going out. That could be the inverter or the LCD, considering the symptom described.

Obviously, you're going to get a blinking question mark if you put a brand new hard drive in, since it's not going to have an operating system on it. If you hold down the "C" key when you turn the machine on (as soon as you hear the chime), it should boot from the Snow Leopard CD. You're also going to have to format the drive with Disk Utility in the Utilities menu before you'll be able to install an OS on it.