Hi I have a Mac Tower beige O/S Tiger 10.4.11. The hard drive has given up. Can I use an external drive or do I have to try and replace the old drive. I know this is an old Computer put I don’t want to junk it. Thanks Norm.

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tiger is getting older and more outdated. Mackintosh is preparing to release the final of the OSX in the spring/summer months. I would personally do one of two things, get a new hard drive that gives you more storage than you will ever need and use it as a ftp server to free up your main computer. or get a decent drive and install a ppc linux distro on it. having linux on it would make the computer faster and last longer.

as for using an external hard drive, the bootdrive would need to be configured i am unsure of how to do this i know that booting from a cd would be apple (command) C and that booting into the kernal with no GUI is apple (command) S.

unless you are absolutley sure that the harddrive is dead beyond fixing try to boot while pressing the apple S, and try to run through the filesystem. i recently had a problem with my tiger tower that appeared to be caused by harddrive failure. in the end a clean re-install of the OS fixed all the problems

You might want to change a new hard drive. This had to be done by certified apple technician after changing a new one check if the mac can run the new hard drive if can re install the mac. You can insert a hard disk and have the Macintosh HD install on it but it would be troublesome.

you might want to follow jordan0420 and make sure the hard drive is really dead. If the hard drive is dead go and change a new one make sure you backup your important data. I suggest you upgrade the ram speed to 4 GB, this will make your macbook faster or you might want add memory until it is 500 GB but that is a lot of GB for someone who uses the macbook normally

I want to thank every body for their help I managed to resolve the problem. Regards norm

Good luck. Hope this time your hard drive life can last longer

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