Chosen Solution
I want to replaced the old hard drive. I bought a new Western digital 160 GB 5400 rpm ATA hard drive. I cloned the new drive with a drive enclosure & used SuperDuper. I get an error message that says the drive is not a bootable drive. When I click on the icon of the drive, everything appears to be there, but when I start the computer while holding down the option key I only see the old drive. Any suggestions? I have reformatted the drive several times & tried to start the computer with the restore DVD’s using the disk utilities with no luck.
I believe there is a size limit of 128 GB on the boot drive. If the drive has NOT been formatted using OS 10.2 or latter. Repartition the drive so your boot sector is less than 128 GB. Clone/dupe to that sector and see if it will recognize/boot. Other solution would be to format and install OS X.x on the new drive then use Migration Assistant to transfer your files. Good Luck, N.
I had to read this question several times to jog my memory as to what might be the problem. Sounds like you did everything right. If you are trying to boot the Book from the drive and it is still in an external enclosure, if it’s a USB, it won’t work. You either need to install it into the Book or put it in a firewire enclosure.
I am unsure how relevant my answer is, given that you had no contact with an Intel-based Mac as I did. However, I encountered tons of trouble when I cloned a PowerBook G4 hard drive on an Intel-based MacBook Pro. From the article above: “By default the Intel-based MacBook Pro set the drive partition to its native Intel-only “GUID Partition Scheme,” which prevents a PowerPC-based laptop to boot using the drive. So I set the 320 GB drive to the PowerPC-native “Apple Partition Scheme,” and of course Mac OS X installed with no problems.” So do make sure that your new drive’s partition is set to Apple Partition Scheme, otherwise your PowerBook won’t like the drive…
Tricky one. Since you have a backup (your old drive), why not try formatting the new drive, installed in the book and install. Maybe that works.
