# Powerbook G4 Hard Drive Replacement??



## aj524 (Aug 30, 2006)

Hi everyone... got a question for anyone who may be in the know on this...

I have a Mac Powerbook G4 that has a dead hard drive. Unfortunately, this machine is out of warranty, so I'm pretty much on my own for getting this back to working order.

I have removed the dead Toshiba 60GB 5400RPM HD and replaced it with a Hitachi Travelstar 80GB, 5400RPM HD.

When I boot the Mac with my copy of OSX Tiger in the drive, the OSX install menus start as usual, but then when it comes time to "Select a destination volume to install Mac OS X software," the list of possible devices is empty.

I was able to install this same hard drive in a 3.5 inch enclosure and hook it up via USB to a windows machine... was able to initialize and format the HD no problem... so I'm assuming this new HD works.

Does anyone know if Mac Powerbook G4s require a replacement hard drive that has been authorized and/or encoded in some way by Apple or will a generic drive work and I am just missing something??

Thank you in advance...

~Andy


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## Emmerac (Aug 26, 2006)

Your hard drive needs to be set to a partition scheme that OS X recognizes before you can format it and install. Boot from the CD and then opening Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. Use Disk Utility set your partition scheme to "GUID_partition_scheme" and then format. Apple has an article in their knowledge base on this here:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303220


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## aj524 (Aug 30, 2006)

I actually stumbled upon the disk utility menu last night and managed to get this going. Your answer is exactly what I was looking for though. Thank you very much! 

~Andy


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