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My PowerBook is struggling to load the OS – what can I do?
Thursday, July 9, 2009 / Hardware, Laptops & Notebooks
Hello,
I am having a problem with my 12″ / 867mhz Powerbook that I am hoping you could help me figure out.
The powerbook is having a hard time loading the OS. What happens is that when I boot the cd and the installer comes up it works fine until I get to the “pick a destination” screen. At that point there is no harddrive to select. So, I open disk utility up and it lists the harddrive, but it will not let me erase or format the HD, it will give me a error message. So, my assumption was that the hard drive is bad (this was the orginal HD), so I open it up and replace the HD with a different one – then boot it up and the same thing happens. So, I have been going crazy with this. I have pulled them several times to see if they are in there wrong, but I have not noticed anything. I have put the HD’s in an enclosure and I then checked them on another machine, they check out fine that way. So, I don’t think it is the hard drive.
I have also tried diffrent OS disks and it is always the same. Is there some hardware issue that would cause this? Any help you can give me would be appreciated.
Thanks,
- Todd Layton
Other than making sure you are using a retail copy of the Mac OS released after the PowerBook was produced, 10.3 or higher, it would probably be a hardware issue. The problem is most likely with the cable or logic board. A replacement PowerBook hard drive cable will be cheap enough for you to test with it. I think this is the right cable for your computer but double check.
If that fails to work for you, then it probably is a logic board issue and you will need to weigh the cost of the repair against just upgrading your Mac.
Please let me know what the outcome is.
- Jacob
