Please help!! MacBook Hard drive issue

Hi guys,

Hopefully I'm posting this in the right place - if not forgive me. I've searched and searched on Google and whilst people have posted similar issues, none of the solutions seem to be relevant to me. This suggests that maybe, putting it nicely, my Mac is well and truly scuppered but hopefully someone may have an idea...

My hard drive of my MacBook (2006/2007) packed in - just crashed, upon rebooting I got the "question mark of doom" - it had happened to me before, and i replaced the hard drive, no big deal. Two years later and the same thing has happened to me (coincidentally, it fatally crashed both times whilst I was watching YouTube videos.. hmm....)

This time around I've bought an unforrmatted hard drive (last time I acquired one that already had OSX installed so it was a case of plug and play). I assumed I would be able to boot from a CD to install OSX and go from there, but now the new hard drive is installed, I'm still getting the question mark.

If I try to boot from CD by pressing the C key, nothing happens. Pressing the option key on boot does nothing bar give me a mouse cursor. I wondered if i was pressing the key at the wrong stage during boot up but surely this isn't hard to get right...?

The CD drive on my MB has not worked for some time so I'm using an external - it seems to act like the computer is trying to read the disc, then nothing.

I've double checked that the hard drive is in place correctly and it seems to be.

So basically - I'm at a loss of what to do. None of the boot keys seem to be working. I can't seem to boot from a CD in an external drive, and using the internal is not an option.

Is there something else I can try? Am I missing something important? Any help would be greatly appreciated!!

Are you sure your boot disk is OK? You should be able to boot the MacBook from the external drive. It may be possible to install OS X on the new hard drive by using Target Disk Mode but that requires another working Mac with a firewire port. Your MacBook is 5 years old so I'm certain you don't want to spend a great deal of money to get it working.

Exactly, it's old and I've had good use out of it so I am not willing to shell out a fortune to get it up and running again.

I have an iMac so running in target disk mode is an option; the problem being none of the boot key combinations seem to have any effect.

The OSX installation disc should work fine - it's never been used and is an original from Apple. Now, if I put it in my SuperDrive it definitely tries to read it, but spits it back out - not shocking considering the drive hasn't worked in 2+ years. It doesn't seem to read from the USB disc drive at all, because I can't seem to direct it to a boot disk. Booting with the option key (which should bring up the Startup Manager?) makes the flashing ? go away but instead gives me a grey screen and a cursor. Seems like every new thing I try just presents a new problem!