[Waterman]

Hi. I don't know if this is a problem with my new Hitachi TravelStar HD for my Pismo or something with the Panther installer. Check it out.

I installed the new HD and booted off the CD. I then opened Disk Utility and erased the new HD to format it as HFS+ (with Journaling enabled). There is only one partition. I checked the stats of the HD using the Info button on the Disk Utility toolbar, and everything looked good. It said it was bootable, the mount point looked good, and everything seemed fine.

But then, I go back to the Installer and select my newly named HD ("Amsterdam" after the Coldplay song), and I get a big fat red exclamation point. It says that I can't install Panther on it because I can not start up from that volume. It was, like, ..... a bummer.

Anyone have any ideas? There are no jumpers on the HD so it seems to be all ready to go.

[SSharon]

Hmmm, so you're saying that you swapped out your old internal HD for a new one and it doesn't want to boot from that with Panther? Maybe try installing an older OS (maybe it modifies the firmware of the drive or something else you can't see to make it bootable) and then upgrade to panther. Interesting problem though, post back with more details as you get them.

[Waterman]

Very odd.

I found someone else reporting this problem after a few exhaustive google searches. They said they hit "Go Back" and then "Continue" again, and it worked. So, inspired by that, I came home from work and re-installed the new HD. Lo and behold! It worked.

I installed Panther and I'm now posting this from the new OS. And O...M...G! It is so much faster. The combination of my new HD which is about 20% faster and the OS tweaks make this the most impressive upgrade yet.

I guess I'll hang on to this Pismo a bit longer.