Member Avatar for stooks

I just bought an old wallstreet powerbook. It came with 32mb of ram and a 4gb harddrive running os 8.5. I installed 512mb of ram, and everything worked fine. Then I got a 60gb hard drive and put it in. When I turn it on I get a gray screen with a little disk in the middle with a question mark on it. I have a copy of os x 10.3 (panther, I think). What do I do? I thought I would just put the first disk in and it would read it and go from there. It just spins furiously for a few minutes and then shuts itself off. As I'm sure you can tell I've never done this before, I've only installed a newer version of os, not started from nothing. Help would be much appreciated.

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Quick checklist and practical steps that follow on from what has described and the hints from .

First, rule out hardware: reseat the new 2.5" drive and the drive connector, then try booting the PowerBook with the original 4GB drive installed. If the machine boots normally with the old drive, the new disk or its installation is the likely culprit. If the PowerBook dies while trying to read an install CD, test that CD in another Mac to confirm it is bootable — many older Mac optical drives struggle with burned media.

If the install CD is good, use the installer’s Disk Utility to prepare the 60GB disk before installing. Partition the disk using Apple Partition Map (APM) and format as Mac OS Extended (HFS+). PowerPC Macs require APM to be bootable; if the partition map is GUID or otherwise incompatible the firmware won’t start the installer. If the internal optical drive won’t boot the installer, install onto the drive from another Mac (attach the drive with a USB/IDE adapter) or use FireWire Target Disk Mode from a working Mac to run the installer onto the 60GB drive, then move the drive back into the PowerBook.

If the machine crashes or powers off during the boot attempt, isolate RAM as suggested: try one known-good module at a time and re-seat the sockets. Also check for a failing battery or swollen components that can create power/thermal issues. Finally, if the disk still won’t appear in Disk Utility when attached externally, run a SMART/drive-test tool on another machine to confirm the 60GB drive itself is healthy.

For the Apple Partition Map concept and why APM matters on older PowerPC Macs, see the Apple Partition Map overview: Apple Partition Map.

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Member Avatar for John A

Well, the reason you're getting the question mark when you try to boot is that the firmware can't find an operating system. That is, you've installed a hard disk, but you haven't installed MacOS on it yet.

Secondly, are you even sure that Panther is compatible with the WSJ PowerBook? This was made a while ago and things have changed quite a bit since then. Ideally, you should instal OS 8 or even 9 if the laptop supports it.

Hope this helps

Member Avatar for stooks

From what I have read 10.3 is the last version officially supported on that model. I don't know what it takes for it to be officially supported, but I have an old imac with the exact same processor (233mhz g3) and it runs 10.3 fine.

How do I go about installing the an os on the new hard drive?

Member Avatar for John A

How do I go about installing the an os on the new hard drive?

If you want to install Mac OS X, I suggest following my Tiger install guide (which is not at all dissimilar to Panther). However, if the machine crashes when trying to boot from the CD, either your drive is bad or the machine can't support 10.3.

-edit-

It could also be that the RAM modules are faulty. When you were using them initially with OS 8.5, it was likely that the modules were not all used up with stored data. Trying to boot the OS X installer from CD could be what put the RAM over the edge.

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