Can't see HD

I would gladly welcome any assistance to this problem before I shatter this Powerbook G3 against the wall. I'm a Windows guy but am trying desperately to help my father with his Powerbook.

Some time ago he heard what he described as a clicking sound. Then some time later his Powerbook stopped booting. He brought it to a repair center who "got it to work" but after he got home with it, within about an hour it wouldn't book again.

He brought it back to the repair center. They said that they couldn't see the HD with the disk setup utility so they used Norton Utilities which apparently allowed them to see it and they claimed that all the system files had appeared to be moved to a new folder called "more". They formatted the drive and reinstalled the operating system.

He started using it and everything seemed ok. Several hours later I met up with him to help him install all the other software he uses. I downloaded Netscape then installed it with no problem. I then downloaded AOL and half way through the install it locked up. The pointer would still move but menus wouldn't open, windows wouldn't move etc. Powered down then turned it back on and nothing, just a white screen. Tried it several more time and once got the little computer to show but then nothing.

So, obiously what the repair guys are doing don't seem to be fixing the problem so I wanted to investigate it myself. I boot from the CD with no problem but it can't see the hard drive. I plugged in another IDE hard drive (but formatted for Windows) not expecting to boot or anything like that but hopefully for the Powerbook to just see it (shows up on the desktop or in first aid or in disk setup but the only item that shows up is the CD Rom. The closest I came to something seeing it was Apple System Profiler which under Devices and Volumes showed "Internal ATA2; ID = 0; Hard drive; No volumes mounted" which was with the original drive intalled again which happens to be a 10G Toshiba.

Can anyone give any advice? I thought of trying to download a better utility but even if I find one I don't think I can get it on to that computer. I could make a CD on my Windows PC but could not make it Mac bootable (that I am aware of). I might be able to set up networking to get the file over but am not sure that would work either. Tried to plug my IPod in to it but apparently it had to be formatted for the system it will run off of.

Like I said, any info at all would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Here is my guess. I think your system disk went south (bad). Most of all the disks that click very loudly in my experience so bad a short time later.

It maybe time to replace the system disk.

rman said:

Here is my guess. I think your system disk went south (bad). Most of all the disks that click very loudly in my experience so bad a short time later.

It maybe time to replace the system disk.

Click to expand...

That was definitely my first thought especially since it couldn't be seen but I am fairly certain that it is an IDE so when I connected another IDE (formatted for Windows) I figured that I would at least see it show up under Disk Setup. Wouldn't that simply be a hardware function? I don't know, maybe it's coded in hardware for the Mac or something like that.

Thanks for your comment.