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No hard drive found when I go to reinstall OS

Hello all-
This is my very first post and it's about a very big problem. Yesterday when I restarted my computer it started back up but would not load past the gray loading screen. Today I tried to reinstall the OS and when I get to the select destination prompt it does not have the hard drive as one of my choices. Please advise

Thanks
Christie

iMac G3 600mhz Mac OS X (10.3.5) 512 ram

Posted on Aug 25, 2006 8:25 AM

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Question marked as Best reply

Posted on Aug 25, 2006 8:32 AM

There's a good chance your hard drive is dead. Boot to the Install disk again and choose Disk Utility from the menu bar. If the hard drive shows up in the list of available drives, choose it and run Repair Disk. If it doesn't show up, then you may need something more industrial strength to try and get the drive repaired. Such as Disk Warrior, Drive Genius or Tech Tool Pro. Sometimes one can see a drive that the other cannot. Disk Warrior is usually the first choice for most Mac users.

None of these will help though if the hard drive isn't even spinning. Then the only hope of recovering any data that you must have is sending the drive to a place such as Drive Savers. These services are NOT cheap, but are the only recourse for a drive which cannot be recovered otherwise.
5 replies
Question marked as Best reply

Aug 25, 2006 8:32 AM in response to christie5

There's a good chance your hard drive is dead. Boot to the Install disk again and choose Disk Utility from the menu bar. If the hard drive shows up in the list of available drives, choose it and run Repair Disk. If it doesn't show up, then you may need something more industrial strength to try and get the drive repaired. Such as Disk Warrior, Drive Genius or Tech Tool Pro. Sometimes one can see a drive that the other cannot. Disk Warrior is usually the first choice for most Mac users.

None of these will help though if the hard drive isn't even spinning. Then the only hope of recovering any data that you must have is sending the drive to a place such as Drive Savers. These services are NOT cheap, but are the only recourse for a drive which cannot be recovered otherwise.

No hard drive found when I go to reinstall OS

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