Internal Hard drive upgrade unsuccesful !!

Question

Looking for help on this one.....
Briefly: iMac 24" aluminium early 2008 (model 2134) trying to upgrade the original 320 gb HDD. So I bought a WD Caviar Black 64 mb, 6gb/s 1Tb drive, intalled it pretty smoothly and then using an install disc restored it from a time machine back up. That went fine then I could not restart the mac (kernel panic). So i trouble shooted with an extended hardware test, disk repair and everything seemed fine. I reinstalled my old HDD again and worked perfectly so I figured my iMac doesn't like this Caviar (due to sata3 perhaps??) so I went and bought a Seagate barracuda sata2 1 TB 7200 rpm and repated the whole process. Again everything went super smooth until the restoring process ended and the iMac was restarted. Kernel panic again. Already tried PRAM, option key. Booting from the CD or my old drive is not a problem at all but from the newly installed drive (x2) ... Impossible
Any thoughts....
Thanks a lot !!

Answer 1

Hi Gus
The SATA 3 should be backwards compatible, but all that I have read suggest that the iMac's will not benefit and in some case's may actually slightly slow down the performance.
Not only that, but the WD Blacks tend to run a little noisier and hotter then there WD Blue counter part. Thus I will always suggest a Blue over a Black in an all and one system like the iMac.
As for the problem you are having, how did you setup the new drives Partition Map Scheme and Format? Most off the shelf drives come setup Master Boot Record and MS-DOS FAT-32 and the Intel iMac's require the drive to be setup GUID Partition Table and Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
If the drive is in the iMac
+1. Boot from your install DVD or Bootable Clone and open Disk Utility.+
+2. Highlight the new HD in the list of drives and select the Partition tab.+
+3. Under Volume Scheme select 1 Partition and click on the Options... button.+
+4. Select GUID Partition Table in the drop down window and click OK.+
+5. Set the Format to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and click the Apply button.+
+6. Once thats done then you can do a clean Install or Restore from your Backup.+
If you have an External Enclosure
+1. Put the drive into the Enclosure and open Disk Utility.+
+2. Highlight the new HD in the list of drives and select the Partition tab.+
+3. Under Volume Scheme select 1 Partition and click on the Options... button.+
+4. Select GUID Partition Table in the drop down window and click OK.+
+5. Set the Format to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and click the Apply button.+
+6. Once thats done then you can do a clean Install, Restore from Internal HD or backup.+
Dennis