Apple Mac HDD

So I've never worked on one of these before. Last week I got a call
from out of town and from the description it would seem the HDD is
shot since the machine is unable to access or write any data. Popping in
a new drive seems to be the obvious, but do these machines have BIOS
just like PC's, does the drive need to be formatted in any special way, will
the 'OS' see the drive just like any other, etc, etc ? I'd like to be a bit
prepared before I totally annihilate the machine, so if anyone has a good
URL on hand (or some advice) I'd be much obliged.

TIA
jona

First, what apple machine is it that you're talking about?
Earlier apples used SCSI drives. Many of these drives were Apple proprietory
and not any SCSI drive could be guaraneed to work unless it was an Apple
specific SCSI drive.
When Apple went to imacs/emacs and later G4 towers they started using
ATAPI drives. ATAPI variety will work much the way a PC gets formatted and
the OS software drive utility software will initialize the drive for Apple
with minimal help from you before attempting to install the OS.
You can get some very definitive support at http://www.apple.com/support/
for initializing a new drive.

--
Jan Alter

or

"jona" wrote in message
...
So I've never worked on one of these before. Last week I got a call
from out of town and from the description it would seem the HDD is
shot since the machine is unable to access or write any data. Popping in
a new drive seems to be the obvious, but do these machines have BIOS
just like PC's, does the drive need to be formatted in any special way,
will
the 'OS' see the drive just like any other, etc, etc ? I'd like to be a
bit
prepared before I totally annihilate the machine, so if anyone has a good
URL on hand (or some advice) I'd be much obliged.

TIA
jona

"Jan Alter" wrote in message
...
First, what apple machine is it that you're talking about?
Earlier apples used SCSI drives. Many of these drives were Apple proprietory
and not any SCSI drive could be guaraneed to work unless it was an Apple
specific SCSI drive.
When Apple went to imacs/emacs and later G4 towers they started using
ATAPI drives. ATAPI variety will work much the way a PC gets formatted and
the OS software drive utility software will initialize the drive for Apple
with minimal help from you before attempting to install the OS.
You can get some very definitive support at http://www.apple.com/support/
for initializing a new drive.

Thanks for the reply. I ssems I'll need to find out more about the computer but
the URL will provide me with the info I need.

Thanks again.
cheers
jona