05-31-2006, 09:44 PM

Put a 20 gig 3.5" IDE drive from a PC into an Indigo imac. Tested it in a PC using IBM's drive test in advanced mode with multiple passes passed with flying colors plus it has a good history. Put it in the mac and click-click-click. Put it back in a PC and it works fine.

Same deal with an ibook 700 MHz I have. Put in a 20 gig laptop drive from a PC and it has strange spinup problems but works fine on a PC. But if I boot from a CD the drive spins up fine and is accessible.

I'm a PC person who is trying really hard to jump into Mac's but I've been messing with these hard drive issues for 2 weeks now and need some advice. Thanks.

05-31-2006, 10:09 PM

IBM Deathstar drive? Pretty common to have the click of death.. I think there was a class-action suit against IBM for those POS drives.. I run an old Maxtor 60gb 7200rpm drive from my PC in my Blueberry iMac 350 (upgraded to 500 now, but was a 350 when I first put the drive in). Works great.
I've had a half dozen of those IBM drives die on me. All died in PC's.. They used to be the fastest drives you could get, and I just kept warrantying them.. Such a shame IBM did that to it's customers.

05-31-2006, 10:29 PM

Thanks for the quick reply. Actually it's a Western Digital drive. I just the the IBM drive test utility to test all brands. It will test any brand but will resfuse to attempt any "repairs" unless it's an IBM brand drive.

05-31-2006, 11:38 PM

When you put the WD drives in did you try to start up from a system CD or from the HD? Once the HD is in the computer you must start from a system install CD, use the disk utility to format the HD and then install the Mac OS. Also, make sure the jumpers are set to match the old Mac HDs; don't assume that the pc jumper settings will work on the Macs.