Chosen Solution

Hello I have replaced and old Seagate Barracuda 1TB HDD (clicking and not booting) with another HDD of exactly the same type. When starting the machine again I couldn’t get past the white screen. I used the option (alt) key and could not see the new HDD. I could hear a faint sound of the drive trying to load but couldn’t see it. I couldn’t use the disk utility function as I couldn’t get to the drive. I can run the machine from an external USB with OSX on it but the internal drive is useless. I use the apple symbol in the top left corner of the screen and ask for the storage option but it only gives me the USB and the optical drive.

  1. Has the old drive damaged something?
  2. or is the new drive damaged also?
  3. Do I have a sata cable fault? Thanks in advance for your help

Boot from the USB drive go to Disk Utilities and format the new drive. GUID and Mac OS X extended. Then see if you can see it and install a system. You cannot use a system older than what the machine shipped with. Pre-Installed MacOS: X 10.6.1 (10A2155) Maximum MacOS: Current*