Mac won't boot, also not from cd!

B

Bluesman

Registered
Ok, i put a new hard drive in my old trayloading G3. I put in the OS 10.3 cd and ran the setup. It was a 30GB drive that i've used for a bunch of months in a PC. I formatted it and made one partition of 7GB to put OSX on (i did some research first and it learned me that it can't be too big). Ok, formatting done. When i want to proceed all partitions have exclanation marks and when i select one it says something like "can't install OSX cause computer can't boot from this drive". After many tries i got tired of it and closed down the installer to try it later on. The computer rebooted and when the screen went off and the on/off button turned orange i pressed it to shut it down.

Now when i turn it on it shows the mac icon with a question mark, then without one, then the two faces icon, then without one and at that point it just completely locks up, it happens right after the mouse and keyboard are detected. It doesn't boot from CD anymore also. The cd drive makes some noises but this stops when this happens (after 2 secs or something). Holding down C, shift or option doesn't help either. With or without CD, it just locks up.

I don't know what to do anymore.
 
What format is the partition in? It must be HFS+ (Mac OS Extended) format for Mac OS X to be able to boot from it.

Edit: technically, you can format it as a UNIX format, but that's a case-sensitive format and not recommended for standard, everyday use. You should only use the UNIX format if you know you need the UNIX format.
 
I got it working again, i put the HD in my PC and formatted it in there. Now it boots from the CD again thank god.

I tried both journaled and HFS+ but the exclanation marks stay there no matter what i do.
 
By the way, the HD jumper setting is set to "Master". I don't know if that has anything to do with it. It's a whole lot of work to get to the HD in this mac, so i can't be bothered to just try it.
 
Ah... sounds like a Western Digital drive -- usually with WDs, to use them in a single-drive only scenario, no jumpers must be used. Their "master with slave present" setting is different from a single-drive setup.

Glad to hear it's working!
 
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