[iBook] OS install on new HD

[Joy Freeman]

Well, this hard drive replacement has turned into a nightmare for my
husband, to whom I left the installation of the OS because, first, I'm too
busy with a big project to spend much time on it right now, and second, I
love doing the hardware stuff he hates, but have little patience for
software stuff; and this one really has me baffled. I told him to send me a
description of the problems he's having and I would forward it to this list.

Are we missing something obvious? Does it sound like I somehow installed it
wrong? Any suggestions or referrals to sites that might tell us how to
approach this? Any help would be greatly appreciated!


Here's what my husband wrote:
______________________________________________

After the new hard drive was in the iBook, I tried installing from CD (the
CD drive usually spits CDs out immediately...but if you keep inserting it,
it will eventually accept the CD and works just fine). The CD was
recognized, and the installer saw the hard drive, but it gave me the red
exclamation point. I also couldn't use Disk Utility from the CD to format
it.

At this point, I accessed the iBook's hard drive in target mode via FireWire
from another Mac. Here, I was able to run Disk Utility against the hard
drive and formatted it into one partition, with journaling. I then installed
10.3 from that Mac and, to test the installation, chose the iBook's hard
drive as the startup disk and rebooted the other Mac. This worked fine.

At that point, I tried bringing the iBook up on its own. I got the grey
apple screen, but did not get the little Stonehenge circle of falling
dominoes underneath it. I waited quite some time, but the system never did
boot up. (I did not get the question mark folder.)

I tried booting from the CD, and here's where I got a surprise. The CD was
no longer recognized, even though it was not spit back out. Once again, I
got the grey apple screen. This strikes me as very odd.

After this happened, I tried a re-install via FireWire, on the theory that I
might not've taken the iBook down correctly, didn't unmount it or something
like that, after the first install. This install also went well, so far as I
could tell, but again, I could not bring the iBook up past the grey apple
screen.

Since then, I've tried a variety of tactics, from booting up on an external
FireWire drive (a Plextor PX-708UF, which works fine with iBooks) down to
trying to bring it up in safe mode.

So far, nothing has worked. I can still boot the other Mac using the iBook's
hard drive via FireWire, but that's all.
______________________________________________

Any help at all would be appreciated,
Thanks,
Joy

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Joy Freeman
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