PowerBook 150: Can't Use Drive Setup

h1> PowerBook 150: Can't Use Drive Setup

Find It
Home
Table Of Contents
Support Pages
Feedback & Contact
Apple Computer, Inc.
Mirror Sites
Huh?

TOPIC

I just upgraded the 120 MB IDE hard drive in my PowerBook 150 to a 500 MB IDE hard drive. However, the PowerBook won't start up from the drive even after installing the correct system software. I tried reformatting the hard drive with Drive Setup and Internal HD Format but they don't work. What should I do?

DISCUSSION

The PowerBook 150 has a driver scheme that is different than most Macintosh computers. The hard disk driver is always taken from ROM and if there is a driver present on the hard disk, the computer usually won't start up from it.

The PowerBook 150 comes with a special utility, Internal HD Format, that will format hard drives for use with the PowerBook 150. However, Internal HD Format will not format a drive that already has a driver partition. Drive Setup, although capable of formatting most IDE and SCSI hard drives, will not run on a PowerBook 150.

So if possible, you should purchase the new hard drive as unformatted. Then you can use Internal HD Format to format the drive correctly. After the drive is formatted, you should be able to install system software and start up from the drive as normal.

If the new hard drive is pre-formatted (whether by Apple or a third-party utility), you will need a disk utility such as Norton's Disk Editor to zero out the data on the first 10 or so sectors (the boot blocks and partition map) so that Internal HD Format won't see a driver partition. Use the steps below to perform this procedure:

Step 1: Boot from a volume containing a disk editing utility and Internal HD Format.
Step 2: Use the disk utility to zero out the first 10 sectors of the hard drive.
Step 3: Restart.
New default partition information may get written to the hard drive again. So you must wipe it out once more.
Step 4: Use the disk utility to wipe out the first 10 sectors once again.
Step 5: Run Internal HD Format and initialize the drive.
Step 6: Install the appropriate system software.

[Previous] [Top] [Next]