Upgraded hard drive not recognized

[stevenjo57]

Used Super Duper to make a bootable copy of my iMac (Intel) to a FireWire drive. I tested it - it booted fine from the external FireWire with the backup.

I purchased 2 internal Western Digital 1 TB hard drives to upgrade both of my iMacs.

I installed the new WD in the first one. Upon booting with the new Internal HD and the FireWire backup hooked up, no hard drive is found. Just the folder with a question mark.

I booted with the Snow Leopard install disks and it did not see the internal, but did see the SD backup.

Thinking it might be the drive, I tried the other new WD. Exact same situation. Neither drive is recognized as bootable, and the internal WD is not even recognized.

Needing my iMac, I put the original drive back in. Everything is now working fine again.

So, I think I am hooking the drives up correctly, but the iMac cannot seem to recognize the internal WDs at all, and when the new WDs are in, the external FW isn't recognized as bootable.

Do I need to do something to make these drives recognizable?

Thanks for any advice.

[dnanian]

Well... starting with the basics, are you sure the drives were properly partitioned, as explained in the Frequently Asked Questions?

[stevenjo57]

Hi Dave. Thank you very much for your reply.

I must admit that sometimes I don't see the forest for the trees, and so maybe this is the case here.

If I have an external SATA drive that I want to copy data to, how do I initialize or format it if the Mac doesn't recognize that the drive is in it?

Are you saying I should put in some kind of external case or something?

If it would boot from the external firewire drive, maybe I could see using disk utility to see if it sees the internal drive, but when the new external drive is in the iMac, the iMac won't boot from the external firewire either.

Thanks for any help. I appreciate it.

[dnanian]

Yes, you'd generally put it in an external case. But if it's internal, you can try booting from the OSX DVD and use Disk Utility to partition it there. If it won't even boot from DVD when the drive is internal, I think you have a hardware compatibility issue.