Problem with new hard drive

Hi all,

The hard drive on my Aluminium iMac broke recently (it was running Tiger), and I replaced it last night (I bought a reconditioned hard drive online that was formatted for Macs. The hard drive is a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750 GB,Internal,7200 RPM). When I restarted the Mac it appeared to work okay, and went through first to the screen where you select your lanaguage, which I did, and then goes to the 'Mac OS X Utilities' menu. Here I can choose from 'Restart from Time Machine backup', 'Reinstall Mac OS X', 'Get help online' or 'Disk Utility'.

In the ideal world, I wanted to go for 'Reinstall Max OS X' but it's saying 'Set up or install a new copy of Lion', which I don't have (or, apparently, the memory to do it anyway!). I put in the Tiger installation disc, and although it recognises it in Disk Utility, I can't work out how to install it - no option comes up when I put the disc in, and no icon appears on the desktop.

As you might have already guessed, I'm not a computer expert, so if anyone has any help they can offer whatsoever then I'd be enormously grateful!

Many thanks for reading, and have a good day.

Welcome aboard Mac-Forums!

My suggestion is to use the Tiger disk to boot (start) your computer and then reformat the replacement hard drive. Following that you can reinstall Tiger.

Please post back if you require specific instructions.

Like hughvane said...you should reformat the drive in the machine you install it in. I would not trust that one is pre-formated.

Mac SK said:

Like hughvane said...you should reformat the drive in the machine you install it in. I would not trust that one is pre-formated.

Click to expand...

Amen.

Yeah, you need to re-boot with the disc in the drive, to run the computer from the DVD. Then pull up Disk Utility to re-format (Mac Extended Journaled) the hard drive, and after that install the OS.

I think you should pop up to Snow Leopard, since it's supposed to run slimmer than earlier versions. OR Lion from a USB; I'd be surprised if it used a ton more memory, and even so memory is not so expensive these days.