replaced hard drive on 24 inch imac... Help!!

[bigtelvis]

hi, i need help. i have looked al over and still am lost. I have a 24 inch white imac. duo core 2 intel 2.16gig 250 gig hd. running 10.6.8'

i purchased a 2 tb hd seagate , i believe it is a 6 satadrive. i am using a jumper to bring down to 1.5 g speed.....if i even need to.

bought a usb adapter and hooked it up to my mac and reformated and used superduper and ccc to make an exact copy of my hd in unit.

i then booted into the drive and it worked fine. BUT if i put it inside my imac and try it ...I get a folder with a question mark. I tred to put in a os disk 10.6.4 and it said it could not load on my system. but it did let me check my drive. I was able to see the 2 tb drive and verify it and check for errors. but could not load a os onto my system... could have been the wrong one though. I do not have original disks.

ANY HELP WOULD BE AWESOME. I know people have done this but I cant get it to work. Is it the wrong drive, is it to big, am i forgetting something? HELP PLEASE

thank you in advance.

by the way, I am getting very good at changing the drive in and out.

 

[Cougarcat]

Does it show up if you press the option key when you restart? If so, go into System prefs-->startup disk and make sure the disk is selected.

Another thing you could try is re-cloning it when it's inside the iMac.

 

[Fishrrman]

I'll try to offer some suggestions.

Like you, I have a white Intel 24" iMac.

I'm going to -guess- (and it's ONLY a guess) that the SATA controller in the white iMac has some kind of "upper limit" in the size of a volume that it can recognize. (On the other hand, the USB adapter may be able to deal with a drive that size, or larger)

This has less to do with drive "speed", than it does with a volume's -size-.

Did you initialize the new 2tb drive to become a single (partitioned), 2tb volume?

The iMac -might- recognize it, IF you were to re-partition into TWO 1tb partitions, or possibly 3 partitions. I'm not sure about this as I've never worked with a drive that size. The only way to know is to try.

You mentioned that you have a "usb adapter". Can you hook up the ORIGINAL drive (the one that used to be inside) using the usb adapter, and boot that way?

If you can boot that way, what do you see when you get to the desktop?

Does the internal drive show up at all?

If you open Disk Utility, can you see the 2tb drive at all?

If you can see it, but cannot "access" it (as a 2tb formatted drive), does Disk Utility give you any options as to re-initializing it?

Try these things and get back to us....