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My PowerBook G4 does not recognize it own hard drive why?

My PowerBook G4 does not recognize internal hard drive. when i boot without cd it will not boot and i will see a question mark on the screen and a small icon that represent mac os. i have Mac OS X 10.3 that i used on my old iMac. when i restart the computer and press ALT it will bring a screen only with cdrom and it will read the cd, when i press enter to install it will reboot and bring a white screen with a Traffic sign that says (do not enter)and ends there. i removed the hard drive and connect to a pc and formatted it but still it will not recognize the Hard drive. what can i do to get to clear that sing and get to installation window? is the problem the Mac OS and if yes which version do i need? pls help.

Answered! View the answer I have this problem too

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Tiger (10.4) would be the best Mac OS for your machine. If the machine is full ram and has a fast drive you can also install Leopard (10.5) but the machine performance could be a little sluggish. Now your problem is the installation disk. You'll have to find a retail installation disk (black disk) cause your iMac disk (grey disk) won't work with the PowerBook. This is a specific installation disk for the iMac only. Also, the hard drive must be formated with a mac, not with a PC.

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I listed where to get it in your other question

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I thought this sounded familiar.

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Hi

I just replaced my old hard drive with a new 80 Gb drive (PowerBook G4 1.5 GHz). I tried to boot up with an OS 10.4 for which I have a CD.

Everything goes well until it asks to identify the hard disk to install the software. There is no hard disk visible.

On the other hand if I open Disk Utility, it shows the hard disk.

What am I doing wrong?

Much appreciate your advice.

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Hi

I am trying to install Tiger 10.4. So my software version is OK.

If the hard disk has to be formatted before the software can be installed maybe that is what is missing in my hard drive.

Are the instructions on how to format my replacement hard drive?

Many thanks

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Please when you on it this is what you see on the screen “ you need to restart your computer.hold down the power button for several seconds or press the restart button

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Something that just bit me was that the PowerPC computers require a “Apple Partition Map” formatted drive to boot from rather than GUID which is needed to boot Intel based machines. I used SuperDuper! to clone the drive, but when I swapped it out it would not boot because I had used the wrong partition scheme. So I needed to reformat it with “Apple Partition Map” and then re-clone it.

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just format the whole drive as FAT32, Master Boot Record externally, MAC OS will recognize and then format it

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Julius Nfor will be eternally grateful.
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