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davecom · Aug 25, 2001, 10:09 PM

I just installed a 40 GB IDE Western Digital 5400 RPM hard disk on top of my other inside my PowerMac G4 Tower(500 MHZ SP). I just wanted to make sure that having them on top of one another would not cause an overheat. Also the new hard disk would only accept screws on one side because it was too thin for the screws on the other side to reach. Is this setup safe?

Secondly I want to check if it's possible to share this drive with a Windows PC using samba for backup and if I can boot PPC Linux or NetBSD off of the second drive.

Thanks for your help,
David

OldManMac · Aug 25, 2001, 10:30 PM

Stacking the drives shouldn't cause an overheat problem. We have several G3/G4 machines in our store running like this and my own G4 400 has had stacked drives since last November. As far as sharing this with a PC, I'm not real familiar with that, but you might want to check out www.thursby.com. Hope this helps.

CRASH HARDDRIVE · Aug 25, 2001, 10:34 PM

Installed on top of the other drive won't hurt it in the least. Drives don't actually get very hot externally, rather internally where they are sealed anyway. Stacking them doesn't increase any internal heat in any significant way. As long as your system has adequate airflow in general, you can stack HDs all day long without incident. Screwed in on one side only won't hurt it either, as long as it's secured.

Heck, for lack of room, I've velcro-ed drives in my machines even, with no problems yet. There's a drive that's been velcro'ed into the bottom of my wife's Mac since I put it in there back in 1996.

I'm not real clear on what you mean by sharing the drive with a Windows machine, once it's installed internally in your Mac-- other than through the usual OS-level networking-- or in the case of other OSes, drive partitioning.

davecom · Aug 25, 2001, 10:40 PM

Thanks for reassuring me. Also about the booting off the second drive thing, how do I do that?

bil207 · Aug 25, 2001, 10:48 PM

I have a second HD installed in my G4 and haven't had any problems re. overheating. I recommend that you try to get the other side of the drive attached, you have to pinch the bracket slightly. There are detailed instructions on doing so here. http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/IDE/add_2...ve/index2.html

CRASH HARDDRIVE · Aug 25, 2001, 10:50 PM

Partition it using Drive Setup, and install your alternate OS on the partition. To the system, each partition shows up as a seperate drive, and each can be booted from independantly.

davecom · Aug 26, 2001, 12:34 AM

Okay but do I just use the startup disk control panel to select which drive to boot from?

CRASH HARDDRIVE · Aug 26, 2001, 01:38 AM

I'm pretty sure Linux installs a boot-loader that gives you the option of starting into MacOS or Linux when you start up. I seem to recall something like that when I played around once with installing PPC Linux on my system... and extension that gave me the choice of Linux or MacOS. Net BSD I have no idea about.

I think Linux PPC no longer even requires a seperate partition, though I may be wrong about that. I haven't kept up with Linux much.

I'm sure the documentation provided with either should explain the details of booting.