[Borderska]

My brother gave me back a stock (256 MB RAM and Airport) 500mhz Pismo I had lent him for a few years and have decided to start upgrading it. I first put Tiger on the original 12 GB drive, everything worked fine. I then decided to put in more HDD storage and took out the original 12 GB drive and replaced it with a 30 GB IBM Travelstar I was using in an external FW enclosure. I followed the same procedure installing Tiger on it, but found that it would not startup on the new volume. The new volume does not show up as an option when you start up with ALT key. When I start from the install disc or from the old 12 GB (now in the FW enclosure) the 30GB drive mounts. I have researched and tried everything I can think of to get this new drive to startup. I double checked that the Travelstar was not in "slave" mode ( no jumper pins) , it is not. I tried to bless the new drive (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25506), no luck. I have reinstalled the system from a different set of install discs, reset pram, and tried some other voodoo, no luck. The only other (probably meaningless) clues are that the processor seems extremely hot now when I run Tiger (off the old drive or the CD) and sound out has not worked for years, but as I said, this does not prevent other system drives from starting up.

I am officially stumped, so any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

[phuture]

The "alt" key???

When I installed a 60GB drive in my Pismo, I had a similar problem. I kept getting the blinking question mark icon upon startup. I forget how it was remedied, but I was able to start it up and everytime, the blinking question mark folder icon would flash for a second or two before the apple logo appeared even though the drive was set as the startup drive in system preferences. It also took a long time to wake from sleep, 3-4 minutes with the lollipop going the whole time. After four or five reinstallations and countless checking of the cable connection, I finally found the problem when I pulled the 60GB hard drive and put it next to my old 6gb unit: There was a jumper thingy on the old 6gb unit and none on my new 60gb drive. So I pulled it off and stuck it on the new drive, installed it, and *poof* the new drive felt right at home!

hope it helps. p.s. alt. keys are evil, that's why macs don't have 'em.

[tigas]

That certainly seems strange. All that I can recommend is that you install the 30GB disk inside, boot from the install disks, partition and format (again) the disk as HFS+ (Journaled) - NOT Case sensitive! - and reinstall.

You did upgrade the firmware to 4.18 before installing your first OSX, didn't you? If you didn't, or can't remember, you need to install OS9 on some disk, *boot OS9* (it won't work in Classic), download the firmware upgrade from Apple, and run it.

I'm away from my Pismo, but I think you can see the firmware version in System Profiler on OSX.