iMac DV 400 Drive swap..

title should read 400 not 4900..

Fixed.

doesn't help if we don't know the details

What OS are you looking at the drive in? Are you booting from this drive, or are you booting from another drive?

Is the Drive partitioned to only have 2GB in a usable partition, with the remaining space unallocated to anything? If it's in an OS X machine, open up Disk Utility, select the disk, and click on partition. That'll show you how the drive is currently partitioned.

That's what I can come up with without knowing more details. If this doesn't solve your problem, please give us some more info so we can get you a solution that works.

Cheers,

The Czar

Funny, I think I had the exact same experience with an iMac DV 400 that I found on the side of the road a while ago. I removed the harddrive and put it in my B&W and, if I remember correctly, was able to recover the missing Gigs shortly using DiskWarrior, but the harddrive was obviously malfunctioning, so I tossed it. I think I suspected water damage at the time, so I didn't bother to pursue it.

Upon reading replies and doing more homework I figured it out.. Thanks..

Then I knocked the damn thing off of my desk and now she really don't work!!

Success just to throw it out!

Oh well..

I wanted to comment on the "another dead monitor" problem first (which may offer a solution to your hard drive problem). I cry a little bit inside when I hear that a perfectly good monitor is trashed for an easily correctable problem.

The "dead monitor" for the DV 400s is NOT a hardware issue, it's a FIRMWARE issue. The monitor "dies" after a direct installation from an OS 8.x or 9.x to OSX 10.2 without installing the firmware. The previous versions of OSX (10.0 and 10.1) automatically checked the machine and revised the firmware, but the 10.2 installation disk did not. After taking my DV 400 (this was an issue with the "slot-loaders") to an authorized Apple repairperson, I was told that there was nothing that could be done with the monitor, and that the machine itself was on it's last legs. After doing some research on the net, I discovered that the problem could be corrected by updating the firmware with the update package on the 10.2 disk. After the update, the monitor was miraculously "resurrected" and everything worked just fine. I suspect the same issues might be contributing to the replaced drive as well. What had angered me was that while the machine was not under warrantee at the time, my copy of OSX 10.2 was, and that the problem could have been corrected with my initial phone call to tech support.

The firmware issue mimics a monitor hardware problem, but before you gut your iMac, take a short break and borrow a friend's monitor, hook it to the external jack, and UPDATE the FIRMWARE.

Apologies to all thread participants if I just accidentally deleted your post.

Attempting to be helpful late at night may not be the best idea.