Re: Replacing iBook Hard Drive
On Sun, Jun 12, 2005 at 12:42:26AM +0200, Marc Menem wrote:
> So I just bought a new drive and replaced the old one, but my computer
> won't boot, just the white screen.
>
> Correct me if I am wrong, but from what I understand about the system,
> apple computers don't have a bios but open firmware which is installed
> on the hard drive. So I guess that to get it fixed I would need one
> way or another to install open firmware on my new drive. How am I
> supposed to do this ?
Have you tried booting from a CD or DVD? The new hard drive won't be
bootable in its initial state from the factory. If it's even formatted,
it will probably be setup with a DOS partition map and FAT or NTFS
filesystems. You just need to boot from some other device and reformat
it properly. I've done this a number of times with a variety of macs
and standard OEM hard drives. However, you may need to partition the
drive with Apple's Disk Utility to avoid problems. Last I checked, the
Linux utilities for mac style partitions run better changing an
existing partition than creating one from scratch.
All of Open Firmware is onboard. You could boot the machine without a
hard drive at all as long as you have some other bootable device.
Brad Boyer
flar@allandria.com
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