[anamexis]

Alright here's the deal:
My father's Pismo 400 was aging so we got a 512MB chip and new 60MB hard drive. Opened it up, installed the new parts, and closed everything up. Plugged it all back in, and upon pressing the power button, nothing happens. No display, no hard drive spinning up, no nothing. (It is worth note that the sound board is shot and has been for a long time. When the ROM does unhappy chimes, does it power up the display at all? Because if it just did sounds we wouldn't hear them.) Anyways, we checked, all of the CPU pins are fine, everything is plugged in, and nothing would appear to be damaged. Does anyone have any ideas why it won't respond?

[anamexis]

Update: That problem was solved, CPU board not snapped in. New problem: Panther refuses to install. It says it will not install on the volume because OS X will not boot off of it. It is a Toshiba 60GB 5400RPM drive (Model number HDD2194/MK6026GAX).

Any thoughts?

[rjt1000]

Hi,

It may be that the hard drive is pre-formated for a PC.

Try booting the Pismo with the OS X installer CD and then using Disk Utility (look for it in one of the menus) to reformat the hard drive.

Does that work?

Best wishes,

Rich

[echosphere]

anamexis, this also happened to be, reboot the machine and reformat with the Install CD, should be fine. For some reason the first time you start up, the Pismo won't recognize the new HD, a second times a charm.

[bstone]

The proc card not being snapped in is the most common reason why a Pismo refuses to boot after and attempted upgrade. I did the same as you, but I put in an IBM Hitachi 7200rpm 8mb buffer 60gb HD. It's totally silent and entirely worth the money. OS X runs sooooo much nicer.