Hi all, I don't use imacs, so I'm a bare bones newbie...
My mom's hard drive died. I recovered her data by mounting her drive on my Linux box (after discovering they use IDE; I thought they used SCSI). Next I bought a 7200rpm 80GB IDE drive and installed it. It appears to have gone in correctly; I ended up with no orphan screws. ;-) The next step was to install the OS. She has an orange CD labelled "imac Software install" which booted. At first, I couldn't install the OS but then found a program to "initialize a hard drive", which I assume is essentially making an HFS file system. After initializing the drive, I was able to install the OS. The installation was impressively simple: * select destination * agree to license (this is MacOS 8.5) * "install data" After awhile, the system read: The installation process has finished. Click quit to leave this program. Click continue to install other software. Looking around the hard drive, I found an installation log. Everything looked good -- no errors. I wrote a test file to the hard drive. So then I took the CD out of the drive and rebooted. The screen, upon reboot, displayed an icon of a folder with a blinking icon that alternated between a "?" and a graphic that looked like a face (a square, two eyes and a "lightning bolt" that looked like a nose"). I'm assuming that this is MacOS's way of saying: I can't find a boot device. I put the OS installation disk back into the computer. My little test file was still on the drive, so I know the drive is working. I reinstalled the OS for the heck of it and rebooted. Nothing. I still got the flashing "?" with the imac "face". I'm at a complete loss here. If this were one of my Linux boxes, I would say that the master boot record isn't pointing to a bootable partition. I refuse to believe that MacOS is very much different than x86/Linux under the hood, so I'm assuming that MBR isn't pointing to a boot partition. Maybe there's nothing written to the MBR. Maybe there was something I should've done to mark the partition as "bootable". I'm completely stumped. Can someone please give me some help on how to resolve this problem? Thanks! Pete -- In theory, theory and practise are the same. In practise, they aren't. GPG Instructions: http://www.dirac.org/linux/gpg GPG Fingerprint: B9F1 6CF3 47C4 7CD8 D33E 70A9 A3B9 1945 67EA 951D -- The iMac List is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | - Epson Stylus Color 580 Printers - new at $69 | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> iMac List info: <http://lowendmac.com/imac/list.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/imac-list%40mail.maclaunch.com/> --------------------------------------------------------------- >The Think Different Store http://www.ThinkDifferentStore.com ---------------------------------------------------------------
