I bought a Mac and need some help.

[danielhq]

I bought a PowerMac G4 that was missing it's hard drive.I borrowed one a friend had that worked and the computer worked fine with it installed so I felt comfortable buying one for it.I got a used one from ebay so I probably can return it but would prefer to be able to use it. When I start it up with the new hard drive installed it opens up to a grey window with an alternating ? and icon of a file and it never changes.I have a dvd of Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.3 but this mac only had a cd drive and zip drive.I tried installing a Mac compatible dvd player but it still won't load the software.Can anyone help me with this?

 

[harryb2448]

G'day and welcome to the forums.

You need an operating system, so pop in the Tiger disc, boot and hold down 'C' immediately after the chime, select language, do not install go to Utilities > Disk Utility and format the drive Mac OS Extended (Journalled), back to Installer and proceed.

Now this will only work with a full retail install version of Tiger, which must be a black disc. Sounds like you have got hold of a silver/grey model specific disc which will work ONLY on the computer it came with.

 

[danielhq]

No I have a black one with the big x but when I press c it still goes to ?.But remember the disc is dvd and it only had a cd drive but I put a dvd drive that is supposed to be compatible with mac.With either drive installed it does the same , ? .Not sure what to do.I do have an external dvd drive(usb) and tried that and it came on and accepted the dvd but like before nothing happened.Thanks Daniel

 

[harryb2448]

USB will not do the trick on an external drive however Firewire will. USB is simply too slow to boot from. What type of optical drive did you install? Who told you it was Mac compatible? Pioneer drives are recognized as native and work well.

Used hard drives are not a good investment as they are very cheap even when new. Rough handling in the mail can ruin even a brand new hard drive. They are very delicate creatures.

 

[Mac SK]

You did set the jumper on the DVD drive the same as the CD drive you removed. You have to insert the disc first then restart push the restart button on the front and hold down the C key before the chime and hold it down.