Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Installed new hard drive in iMac, need help!

I

ivbaseball06

macrumors member
Original poster
Nov 20, 2010
51
0
My hard drive has been wonky lately so I decided to swap it out. I have an early 2006 iMac, details here:

http://support.apple.com/kb/SP35

The drive I used was a Western Digital WD10EADS 1 TB drive. Everything went well in the hardware installation.

Upon booting the computer from the snow leopard install disc, the 'Choose disk to install Mac OS X on' box is empty. The hard drive also doesn't show up in disk utility. When I go to system profiler the Serial ATA category gives me a couple lines of info like Intel and 1.5 gigabits, but I think that's not the actual hard drive but the embedded information (am I right?).

So, what can I do? I'm almost positive the wires are fine, but I'll tear it back open if I need to. Is this hard drive compatible with this iMac? Can it handle a 1 TB hard drive? If it couldn't, would it still show up in disk utility but just with less capacity?

Right now I'm burning an Ubuntu disc and I'm going to see if I can boot to Ubuntu Live. That will at least tell me if it's software or hardware.

Any help is appreciated!
 
Are there any other chords other than the SATA or power supply going to the HD that I may have missed that would cause it to not be noticed?
 
Update: Disk shows up fine when booting from Ubuntu. That rules out connection errors. It has to be compatibility or formatting problems now, right?
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_6 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8E200 Safari/6533.18.5)

Wasn't formatted. Completely empty but you would think it would still show in disk utility. Added Apple Partition Map in ubuntu utility but still doesn't work.
 
I just replaced the HD in my iMac and went through a re-install.

Go to the Utilities menu at the top of the screen after you've booted off the MacOS X DVD.

Run Disk Utility and partition the disk. It probably didn't work when you partitioned via Ubuntu because you need to select the GUID partition table type that MacOS X uses (vs MBR partition table that Ubuntu likely used).
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_6 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8E200 Safari/6533.18.5)

The hard drive doesn't show up at all in Mac disk utility.
 
Hi ivbaseball,
you have to make the new HD Mac friendly:)
You can not install anything on the HD 'till you initialize the HD.
You can do that from the install DVD. After you choose the language the top Menubar will appear. This DVD has a Disk Utility build-in, find it on the pull-down menus & format the hard drive.
Now you can install the MacOS...
 
ivbaseball06 said:
My hard drive has been wonky lately so I decided to swap it out. I have an early 2006 iMac, details here:

http://support.apple.com/kb/SP35

The drive I used was a Western Digital WD10EADS 1 TB drive. Everything went well in the hardware installation.

Upon booting the computer from the snow leopard install disc, the 'Choose disk to install Mac OS X on' box is empty. The hard drive also doesn't show up in disk utility. When I go to system profiler the Serial ATA category gives me a couple lines of info like Intel and 1.5 gigabits, but I think that's not the actual hard drive but the embedded information (am I right?).

So, what can I do? I'm almost positive the wires are fine, but I'll tear it back open if I need to. Is this hard drive compatible with this iMac? Can it handle a 1 TB hard drive? If it couldn't, would it still show up in disk utility but just with less capacity?

Right now I'm burning an Ubuntu disc and I'm going to see if I can boot to Ubuntu Live. That will at least tell me if it's software or hardware.

Any help is appreciated!
Click to expand...

Recently fitted a 1TB western digital HD in an older machine (20" G5 iMac), without problem. There should be no compatibility issues with an intel machine.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_6 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8E200 Safari/6533.18.5)

Stan Mikulenka said:
Hi ivbaseball,
you have to make the new HD Mac friendly:)
You can not install anything on the HD 'till you initialize the HD.
You can do that from the install DVD. After you choose the language the top Menubar will appear. This DVD has a Disk Utility build-in, find it on the pull-down menus & format the hard drive.
Now you can install the MacOS...
Click to expand...

Doesn't show up in disk utility.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_6 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8E200 Safari/6533.18.5)

Brasshat said:
ivbaseball06 said:
My hard drive has been wonky lately so I decided to swap it out. I have an early 2006 iMac, details here:

http://support.apple.com/kb/SP35

The drive I used was a Western Digital WD10EADS 1 TB drive. Everything went well in the hardware installation.

Upon booting the computer from the snow leopard install disc, the 'Choose disk to install Mac OS X on' box is empty. The hard drive also doesn't show up in disk utility. When I go to system profiler the Serial ATA category gives me a couple lines of info like Intel and 1.5 gigabits, but I think that's not the actual hard drive but the embedded information (am I right?).

So, what can I do? I'm almost positive the wires are fine, but I'll tear it back open if I need to. Is this hard drive compatible with this iMac? Can it handle a 1 TB hard drive? If it couldn't, would it still show up in disk utility but just with less capacity?

Right now I'm burning an Ubuntu disc and I'm going to see if I can boot to Ubuntu Live. That will at least tell me if it's software or hardware.

Any help is appreciated!
Click to expand...

Recently fitted a 1TB western digital HD in an older machine (20" G5 iMac), without problem. There should be no compatibility issues with an intel machine.
Click to expand...

Good to know. Thanks
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_6 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8E200 Safari/6533.18.5)

djc6 said:
Do you have access to another mac? Just curious if it appears in target disk mode:

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1661
Click to expand...

Will give this a try and let you know.
 
ivbaseball06 said:
Doesn't show up in disk utility.
Click to expand...

This is the long way, but put your old HDD back in your iMac and plug the new HDD into an external and then try to format? Or put the new HDD in a PC and try to format? If it isn't showing up in any of those attempts then I'd say you need to get a replacement HDD. Cause this all sounds really weird.

EDIT: I have put a 1.5 TB WD into my 24" iMac (intel 2008) with zero problems.
 
So it took me about 2 hours just to get the disc out of the tray because it didn't know what else to boot to. Once I finally did I booted to Ubuntu again. When I went into disk utility this time it wouldn't find the hard drive. Makes no sense.
I yanked the drive and put in my old one. I'm going to see if I can get it working as an external. Once I get that done I'll reinstall it. Probably what I should have done to begin with.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back