I just bought ibook that was working fine,(refurbished from Apple last June, still under warranty, I purchased last week from Ebay power seller) but i wanted a bigger drive. Bought the drive, took it to an certified Apple tech and had it installed, but no system because I wanted to use it as a temporary external drive for a day or two, which I did.
So the drive is visible and usable. So is the CD drive, because when I make a firewire connection between my G5 and my ibook, any Cd I put in the ibook comes up on my desktop and works just fine.
But the ibook will not boot from ANY CD, and I can’t figure out how to install a system! OSX 1.0, Panther, Tiger, the ibook “restore” cds, Techtool, Norton…nothing. It will not boot from the CD! So how do I get a system on it? If I try to put the system install CDs in my G5 and install into the ibook via Firewire, it tells me to restart so that the install can begin! I haven’t tried it, I’ve assumed that hitting that restart button would make the G5 restart, not the ibook.
I bought this thing specifically to take on a trip to New York…and I’m leaving Sunday morning at 5am! I need to load my documents and applications on it before then! HELP!! I’m freaking out!
(And before you suggest it: I’ve held down the C, I’ve reset the PRAM about 12 times.)
Would this work?[ol]
[li]Boot the G5 from the install CD[/li][li]Boot the Powerbook in target disk mode, as you have been the last few days.[/li][li]From the G5, install OSX to the Powerbook as an external drive[/li][/ol]
An alternative would be to take the Powerbook back to the tech who installed the hard drive. I suppose it is possible that something went wrong in the hard drive installation which caused this problem. However, upon rereading your post, I see you need to travel Sunday, and it’s Saturday morning.
I was going to refer you to Apple’s support forums, but it looks like you’ve already posted there.
In any event, I’d follow the recommendations of the other posters–boot up the install CD on your G5 and attempt to select the attached iBook as the target of your install. (If you can’t select it, don’t worry–you can always just choose not to install an OS at all, so you aren’t going to accidentally ruin your G5, too.)
Just tested this on my macs–booted up an OSX install CD from an iMac, and, when you get to about step 4 of the install process, it asks you to select your install destination. I could see both my iBook (running in firewire target disk mode, but with an installed OS) and another, regular firewire drive (that has no OS on it).
Thanks all, now I just need to get a disc that will boot the G5… Iseem to have misplaced teh first disk of Panther…may have to invest in Tiger after all…
And find out what the hell is going on with my CD!
You could also use CarbonCopy Cloner (freeware, avail. at versiontracker.com) and cc your working copy of your OS to the blank drive.
Or, if you’ve ever bought an external drive and had it come with a free copy of Retrospect Express, that also will make nice bootable clones of any existing drive (via the “Duplicate” drive)
PS: I would nevertheless put ina call to Apple, since this refurb is under warranty. It really ought to boot from CD, and you’ve tried it with a sufficient number of CDs to rule out probs with the CD media.