04-23-2008, 04:04 AM

hello, im new here and was looking for some helpful suggestions if anyone has any. my powerbook fell off the counter the other day and when i picked it up, a weird MS-DOS looking black screen with numbers came up on the screen. it looked like it was searching for something and then a message came up and said something along the lines of "im slipping and can't hold on much longer".

i turned off the computer and started it up again hoping for it to start working but it just chimed and remained on the grey screen with the apple logo. i tried to reinstall the startup disks but when i had to choose a place to download the folders, there was no Mac Hard Drive icon like there usually is.

i took it to the mac store and they said that it might be the hardrive that was damaged in the fall so i bought a new hard drive and tried to replace it but the same problem is still going on. no place to download startup folders.

has this ever happened to anybody or does anybody have any idea what the problem could be? im thinking about sending it into apple to have whatever it is detected and fixed but im not sure if it can be or if there is a less expensive place anybody knows of.

thanks in advance for any help

04-23-2008, 04:46 AM

From the sounds of it, you may need an exorcist.

That is the single creepiest thing I have ever heard.

Sorry to derail the thread, but, wow.

04-23-2008, 09:43 AM

The message that you saw is just a cute little Easter Egg that the devs put in a kernel panic message if I remember correctly.

Well, it looks like your Mac can't find your HD, which you already know. By saying that you can't download the startup folders, have you tried to actually reinstall the OS? The computer won't be able to boot to a blank hard drive, so you'll need to put the install CD in the drive at startup and hold the Option key to select it to boot to. Then you'll be able to bless and format the hard drive and get the new OS on. I'm guessing that the old drive is junk now and you've lost everything on it unless you want to send it in for a recovery.

If you have tried to install the OS on the new hard drive and it still can't find the volume (meaning it can't see the hard drive at all), there is the possibility that the IDE/PATA inferface came loose from the logic board or was damaged (or for that matter, it could just be a logic board issue).

Please start the computer, hold option, and let me know if your PowerBook can actually see the new drive you put in.

One more thing[/Jobs], did you make sure the hard drive is actually connected correctly?

04-23-2008, 02:23 PM

not to bash on Apple service techs, but there's a decent chance that the old hard drive is still working. Hard drives are made to be abused much more so than a laptop. I'm not saying it's 100% sure, but there's a good chance that the fall only knocked it lose. In either case though, the new drive should be connected properly now because (i'm assuming) the apple tech did it right (or you did it right).

It could also be that the fall damaged some of the pins or pin connections so the drive(s) can't be recognized. I side with Moore in that you should try to book from a CD to see if the drive can be recognized by the installation software (ie. recognized by the computer at all).

good luck

04-24-2008, 01:18 AM

hey guys, thanks for the info. im going to try it later tonite. im beleiving that the old hard drive is still entact. just because the same problem happens with the new hard drive that i just installed. everything is connected properly except when i was trying to use the OS startup disks, i was holding the "C" key at the chime instead of the "option" key. ill give that a try. but after taking apart the mac and making sure everything is connected correctly, im starting to think that its a problem with the logicboard (since that is the part of the computer that i know nothing about. ive been weighing my options and im starting to think that it would be cheaper to buy an old powerbook on ebay and use the old hard drive in it rather than to fix the logic board.