What sort of state is the Mac Portable battery in?
The Mac Portable absolutely needs a good battery installed before the hard drive will spin up. This is because the AC Adaptor alone cannot produce enough power to reliably start the hard drive spinning. If the battery is not present, or has an unacceptably high internal resistance, you'll see the backlight (in that particular Mac) dim as the computer attempts to crank the hard drive up and fails.
It used to be possible to buy the Gates (now Cyclon) lead acid cells used in the Portable battery and re-pack the battery. I converted my Portable to using a 2.5" PowerBook SCSI drive many years ago and this fixed the "needs good battery" problem for me. My Portable now has a Compact Flash card as its "hard drive" and this is a very satisfactory solution (so far), since it's now a very quiet computer. I put up a post on this about 18 months ago.
The Mac Portable absolutely needs a good battery installed before the hard drive will spin up. This is because the AC Adaptor alone cannot produce enough power to reliably start the hard drive spinning. If the battery is not present, or has an unacceptably high internal resistance, you'll see the backlight (in that particular Mac) dim as the computer attempts to crank the hard drive up and fails.
It used to be possible to buy the Gates (now Cyclon) lead acid cells used in the Portable battery and re-pack the battery. I converted my Portable to using a 2.5" PowerBook SCSI drive many years ago and this fixed the "needs good battery" problem for me. My Portable now has a Compact Flash card as its "hard drive" and this is a very satisfactory solution (so far), since it's now a very quiet computer. I put up a post on this about 18 months ago.