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onelane · Apr 14, 2008, 08:19 AM

I have an older G4, 1st gen AGP 400mhz. i had my main hard drive go bad about 6 months ago, i replaced it and it worked for about 6 months, before one day it locked up, and upon reboot the computer would not recognize either of the hard drives previously installed. i thought maybe it was bad luck and the drives went down or that the new one died, and i dont think the other one had an OS on it. So i bought a new western digital and installed it and when i boot from osx 10.4 system disc it still does not see the new drive? the jumpers are set right, the drive gets power and spins up? i switched the ata cable and that didnt help? is it possible that something on the motherboard fried and is not reading the drives? the ata cable is obviously working for the dvd-ram drive that i boot from cd on? perhaps something is shorting on the motherboard that caused the other drives to fail, cause i think i've lost 2 in the last year or so?

any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. i've been on macs for 15 years, and am comfortable swapping hard drives and that type of stuff, but things deeper in the operating system like bios stuff is a bit over my head.

Sherman Homan · Apr 14, 2008, 08:26 AM

Most new hard drives need to be formatted, the Installer can't "see" the drive because it isn't HFS+. Boot from the install disk, choose your language, but don't start the installation. Go to the Utilities menu bar, choose Disk Utility, erase the drive. Now, if your new drive is bigger than 128 gigs (probably!) You will need to partition it because the older G4s can't see anything bigger.

onelane · Apr 14, 2008, 08:36 AM

thanks i will try that when i get home tonight. i didn't think of that.

onelane · Apr 15, 2008, 06:10 PM

that seems to work.

so there is no way for the mac g4 to have an internal drive larger than 128gb? that kinda stinks. i did the partition and that's all it would let me do? or is there a work around for this?

Sherman Homan · 06:41 PM

Pop in a PCI controller card for the drive. On the other hand, will your current set up allow you to format a 128 gig partition and then format another? It is inconvenient to have a bunch of drive icons, but it does work.... sometimes!

onelane · Apr 15, 2008, 06:53 PM

no, every time i upped the partitions it divided them out of the 128gb, wouldn't let me up the number. pci card probably the only option.

Sherman Homan · Apr 15, 2008, 08:06 PM

Originally Posted by onelane

no, every time i upped the partitions it divided them out of the 128gb, wouldn't let me up the number. pci card probably the only option.

Pretty cheap and easy to do.
Best of luck!

onelane · Apr 15, 2008, 08:39 PM

thanks for the info.

with the pci card, there won't be any issues using that as a startup disk, will there?

Sherman Homan · Apr 15, 2008, 08:54 PM

Good point! Make sure that it has Mac boot firmware. Sonnet and Acard both do ATA Mac boots. I had a QuickSilver for years that had a PCI card that wouldn't boot, I used the old 128 gig drive as the master and the card for storage. It worked, and at the time was way cheaper.

onelane · Apr 15, 2008, 08:57 PM

Thank you sherman.