I took my Rev A iMac apart and swapped out the ata ribbon cable with a 24" 2 drive cable so that I may connect the longer end to an IDE drive in an external housing. I had some problem getting it to initialize, but I think that was due to my inexperience in setting up a drive . As of now, I have the external drive, a deskstar gpx, partitioned into 3 partitions. 1 gig, 6 gig and 12 gig...in that order. I cant seem to be able to boot off the drive at all. The 6 gig partition is identical to my "main" boot drive. I even tried putting a system folder on the 1 gig. I am able to boot off my stock 4 gig which is in two partitions( that is installed inside the iMac). The external drive is self powered. When I try to boot off it, I get a flashing ? mark, then it finds the internal drive which is spinning and boots off that. After it finds a system on the internal drive, the external starts making its noises and mounts. I have the motherboard connected to the middle connector, the master at the short end and the slave at the other end of the 40 wire ribbon cable. I can probably live with it this way, but I would love to boot up off the faster drive . I was wondering if the motherboard should be at the end of the cable instead of in the middle connector....any thoughts???
Denny
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