Macbook A1181 problem

Hello everyone I am new here and like this forum a lot, read a few of the threads and rather impressed.

I do not as a rule work on Apple products however a good friend has an A1181 notebook that the hard drive died on.
I opened the laptop and pulled the hard drive out and put in a brand new WD Black drive.
When I go to install the OS it is not detecting the drive, to be certain I took the drive out and bench tested it and it passed.
There is a SATA connector that goes from the drive to the main board, is it worth buying one or do you think the controller on the mainboard is shot?

I plugged in a 32GB USB flash drive and was able to install the OS to it and the notebook is functioning normally.

Any advise from Mac gurus would be appreciated.

I think the cable is worth a shot if you can get them inexpensively off ebay

louishen said:

I think the cable is worth a shot if you can get them inexpensively off ebay

Click to expand...

Replaced the cable with a working one I got, nothing changed the system still does not see the drive. Any ideas? How do you go into the bios with a Mac?

damascus64 said:

Replaced the cable with a working one I got, nothing changed the system still does not see the drive. Any ideas? How do you go into the bios with a Mac?

Click to expand...

Macintosh computers don't have "BIOS".

As far as the original question/issue...with the replacement HD not being recognized...was the new HD formatted to be used on a Mac? Mac's need the HD formatted differently from Windows computers.

- Nick

pigoo3 said:

Macintosh computers don't have "BIOS".

As far as the original question/issue...with the replacement HD not being recognized...was the new HD formatted to be used on a Mac? Mac's need the HD formatted differently from Windows computers.

- Nick

Click to expand...

Can I use Hirens to format it? What file system do I format it to?

So how does one format a brand new hard drive to be installed on a Mac? Is it not like windows where it formats the new drive when you go to install the OS? I looked up instructions on OS-X installations and it says nothing about pre-formating the hard drive.

Nevermind DUH!!!! I never noticed the bar on top at boot. I got it figured out. Thanks for the replies guys.

damascus64 said:

Nevermind DUH!!!! I never noticed the bar on top at boot. I got it figured out. Thanks for the replies guys.

Click to expand...

Yes...that top menu bar when you boot from an OS install disk can be a little troublesome. Great to hear you figured it out!

- Nick