[rozwado1]

iBook 500 (not mine thankfully) - wouldn't boot before, did some diagnostics in UNIX (with help from some MacNNers via IRC) and it showed the HD to be dead. Got a new one, installed today and went to install Panther.... wouldn't let me. Installer showed red exclamation points by drive. Wouldn't let me do anything to it.

I booted the iBook into cmd+T and installed Panther to it successfully. Even booted with it through Target disk mode and setup the user account. I installed some files and did some setup, then disconnected and tried to boot it by itself -- no luck. Gets stuck at grey apple screen, no progress wheel - won't let me boot to verbose or safe/single user mode.

I know iBooks have logic board problems, but wouldn't the computer just be dead if that was the case? I'm lost and forever confused with this one. I'm going to bed now, but I'll check repies in the morning. It's a late 2001 500 dual-USB with 384MB ram and new HD/new install of Panther.

[sideus]

That sounds like the same problem I was having with my sister's iMac DV the other day. Install a new 30GB drive, formatted it and tried to install OS X and it would not allow me to. That big exclamation point would be there and the installer said it could not install OS X on the hard drive. After multiple reboots and formatting, the installer finally took and installed OS X with no problems. It was weird.

[rozwado1]

Ok. A strange combination of about 10 Diskwarrior rebuilds, fsck -y's, and PRAM resets got me to a friendly install screen. I was sweating it there. The HD worked and booted from Firewire, but couldn't do it itself. It showed up and reported to be OK with Disk Util, DiskWarrior, and through the shell - but it was unresponsive to the iBook. It's working fine now, but I'm still hesitant to have alot of crucial data on it.