[richt_t]

Hi all

This is a long one.

The other day my computer frooze and, rather impatiently, I held down the power button until it went off. Then I tried to restart it, but all I got was a black screen with a white cursor in the top left hand corner. After a lot of fiddling about I'm now trying to re-install OS X. The trouble is when I get to the point where you have to 'select destination' there's no destination to select - the dialogue box is empty. When I connect an external hard drive it sees that so it seems that the computer is having difficuulty finding the internal hard drive.

So, here are the questions. How do I get it to see the internal hard drive (I've run disc utility and all appears fine)? Can I choose the external hard drive to act as my start up disc? If so, can I then access the data that was on my hard drive?

There are more questions but I'll leave it at that for now.

Hopefully somebody can help.

Cheers

Richt

[kick52]

it looks like the disk is damaged. dont always trust disk util.
you could try reformating the drive, but that would wipe all your data.

try disconnecting the drives, and have a look at the bus. it might be damaged.

and yes, you can use an external drive to boot, if your mac is up for it. what computer are you using? how old is your HD?

[richt_t]

I've got an ibook G4. I bought it a couple of years ago.