Help restoring MacBook

[EyefulPower]

Before I give up entirely I'm hoping for advice.
I have an MacBook Intel Duocore 2.0, 160 gb, 2mb ram, Tiger 10.4.11 – It will not boot from anything. There is no drive clicking noise. I went to the Genius bar and they mounted from an external FW and tried Disk Utility but couldn't repair, no red alert S.M.A.R.T. status.

I tried booting from:

• Original Tiger Install disk
• DiskWarrior v.41 CD
• FW target mode from an iMac Intel Duo Core (same OS version).
• External USB 500 Maxtor drive where I had mirrored the MacBook using SuperDuper! (but did not format drive using GUID partition, who knew?)
• SanDisk 2GB Cruser USB Flash stick, formatted GUID partition, used "DasBoot" freeware to copy DiskWarrior CD and DataRescueII. No boot.

I have an old external OWC FW 400 (Oxford CS), 40 GIG and reformatted it to see if I could make it a boot drive, but it fails to make a GUID partition.

I just need to get some photos off the MacBook. Is there a way to make a boot drive from original install DVD? Any help appreciated.

[dnanian]

Why not just mount it in FireWire target disk mode to your other iMac and access the files?

[EyefulPower]

Originally Posted by dnanian

Why not just mount it in FireWire target disk mode to your other iMac and access the files?

I did try that and the MacBook would not show up on the iMac. The large target disk icon on the MacBook was displayed so I assumed I did it correctly.

[dnanian]

That sounds like the disk is damaged enough that there's little you can do. Booting it from something else isn't going to somehow 'fix' the drive...

[EyefulPower]

Originally Posted by dnanian

That sounds like the disk is damaged enough that there's little you can do. Booting it from something else isn't going to somehow 'fix' the drive...

I've never run into this before, but i thought maybe even if the drive is damaged the MacBook could still boot from optical media or an external drive. That way I could run some utility that would definitively tell me it's no use.

During my attempts it's been either showing a cursor, or Apple logo, or spinning gear, or just a blank gray screen. I've read that it's possible the MB drives can get "unseated" but since I'm still under warranty I'm squeamish about taking the drive out to test it somewhere else. Should I?

[dnanian]

Well, you can try, sure. It should still be able to start up from something else, but if the internal drive isn't responding properly it could 'hang' there for quite a while as it tries to locate the internal drive.