Q: 145B with apparently dead HD
Hiya,
I just spotted a Powerbook 145B at a fleamarket for next to nothing, and couldn't resist getting it. There was no disks or documentation, just the 'book and power cord. Now, I should mention that I have absolutely no experience of vintage Macs.
I wasn't very surprised that, once I'd gotten home and plugged it in, it didn't boot. It powers up, but I get the question mark disk logo. When it starts, I hear... well, absolutely nothing after the start-up sound. I suppose I should be hearing some kind of noise from the hard disk if it was trying to read it, even if there was no system installed or the system fails to load for some other reason?
Now, I managed to download and write the 7.5 Network Access Disk on a PC and, voila, it does indeed boot with it. However, there's no hard disk icon to be seen.
So, does this mean the HD is probably dead, then? Is there anything that could still be done?
I just spotted a Powerbook 145B at a fleamarket for next to nothing, and couldn't resist getting it. There was no disks or documentation, just the 'book and power cord. Now, I should mention that I have absolutely no experience of vintage Macs.
I wasn't very surprised that, once I'd gotten home and plugged it in, it didn't boot. It powers up, but I get the question mark disk logo. When it starts, I hear... well, absolutely nothing after the start-up sound. I suppose I should be hearing some kind of noise from the hard disk if it was trying to read it, even if there was no system installed or the system fails to load for some other reason?
Now, I managed to download and write the 7.5 Network Access Disk on a PC and, voila, it does indeed boot with it. However, there's no hard disk icon to be seen.
So, does this mean the HD is probably dead, then? Is there anything that could still be done?
MacBook (Core 2 Duo), Mac OS X (10.5)
Posted on Aug 26, 2008 8:59 AM