I think I fried the hard drive

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Level 2

170 points

I think I fried the hard drive

I tried upgrading to a new OS and now the drive seems fried. I get the apple and the swirly thing, but it won't boot up. My Superdrive is dead and I tried reinstalling the OS from the disks on an external, but no matter what I tried, it won't read the disks (used all the configs for the keys to start up from external drive). I think I may need a new harddrive. How hard is this? I went and bought a brand new 21.5" imac but want to give this to a friend.

imac, Mac OS X (10.4.2)

Posted on Dec 6, 2010 4:30 PM

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Answer 1

etresoft

Level 8

46,098 points

Dec 6, 2010 5:47 PM in response to JoanneD

Connect the external drive to the new machine. Copy any files you want to save to the new machine, because you'll be erasing the external drive. Use Disk Utility to partition the external drive into as many partitions as you have install disks. They should probably be 10 GB in size or so. Use Disk Utility to restore each old install disk to a separate partition on the external drive.

Now connect the external drive to the old machine and try to boot. If it boots, you will be running the installer and you can install the OS. If it doesn't boot, try using Target Disk Mode ( http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1661) to connect the old machine as an external drive attached to the new machine. Use Disk Utility to erase the hard drive of the old machine. Then when you boot the old machine using the external drive, it should find the install partition.

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