New internal HD

Hello,

I have an old mac book pro from 2006, I recently had hard drive failure... lots of bad sectors so I decided I'd buy a cheap second hand hard drive and install ubuntu on it. That's proved to be more difficult.

So I've inserted my old MAC OSX DVD into the drive and booted up and it's loaded only to tell me that it cannot be installed. Now I believe this is because of the format of the hard drive is probably ex. windows.

Does anybody have any idea how to a) install OSX onto a new hard disk b) change the format of a disk since it's an internal laptop drive I can't plug two in and format the new one. c) or install ubuntu on a fresh hard disk off a cd/hard drive I know I cannot install it off a USB.

Regards
J

You need to use Disk Utility to format the HDD when you boot from the Install disk. Needs to be formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

From there you can install Mac OSX.

Thanks, but when I get to the screen all of the options are greyed out. Is this perhaps because it's not an apple HD? Or something silly like that. I know apple get quite anal about those sorts of things.

The options are all grayed out in the Disk Utility that you are booting from? Select the hard drive from the list on the side and click the Partition tab, choose 1 Partition from the drop down list, click Options at the bottom and choose GUID and label your partition and choose the HFS+ Journaled Format and Press format. Then you should be able to install OSX to it.

Thanks for both of your advice, I haven't been able to touch the laptop for a while and I'm trying again at the moment.

My main problem is that it rejects the new hard disk before it has even booted even with my installation disk in. I've tried tricking it by swapping them after the boot, but it obviously it's not the right drive and it gets a memory allocation error while formatting because they are different sizes (probably a bunch of other problems with that method too).

Regards Jsiret

Just a quick question, does it have S.M.A.R.T. status "verified"? ie, the HDD itself isn't failing? I was trying to install Snow Leopard on an old HDD from another computer, and it turned out Disk Utility wouldn't bother to install OSX because the disk was failing anyway! All the options were greyed out. Quite clever really.

Just something to take a look at I suppose?

Good luck!