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lunaticbunny · Sep 1, 2003, 02:56 AM

Here's the problem, i have PowerMac G4 QS800, and just got a new western digital ide 120GB hard drive. it should be a simple plug n play routine, but not so in my case. i've set the two drives to master and slave, booted her up and used disk utility to format the new drive. well this is where the problem occurs... i set my partition and hit format and all i get is "preparing drive ... unmounting old volumes" nothing else happens. what am i doing wrong? help!

chabig · Sep 1, 2003, 07:38 AM

It sounds like you're doing everything right. Perhaps you're not being patient enough (although it shouldn't take very long).

What do you mean "nothing else happens"? Does Disk Utility crash? Does the screen freeze? What does disk utility say? How do you know it didn't work?

Chris

lunaticbunny · Sep 1, 2003, 02:25 PM

Originally posted by chabig:
It sounds like you're doing everything right. Perhaps you're not being patient enough (although it shouldn't take very long).

What do you mean "nothing else happens"? Does Disk Utility crash? Does the screen freeze? What does disk utility say? How do you know it didn't work?

Chris

i know it hasn't crashed because i can still move the window around. but the progress bar doesn't move or change. i've left it for over an hour and nothing...

Angus_D · Sep 1, 2003, 02:31 PM

Originally posted by lunaticbunny:
i know it hasn't crashed because i can still move the window around. but the progress bar doesn't move or change. i've left it for over an hour and nothing...

Moving windows in Cocoa applications is actually handled by the windowserver itself, so you can move them around even if the application has crashed.

lgs · Sep 1, 2003, 02:56 PM

Originally posted by lunaticbunny:
Here's the problem, i have PowerMac G4 QS800, and just got a new western digital ide 120GB hard drive. it should be a simple plug n play routine, but not so in my case. i've set the two drives to master and slave, booted her up and used disk utility to format the new drive. well this is where the problem occurs... i set my partition and hit format and all i get is "preparing drive ... unmounting old volumes" nothing else happens. what am i doing wrong? help!

You should see the new drive listed in Disk Utility. First, click on the new drive on the left window. If you are partitioning the drive, make sure to choose how many partitions you want under the volume scheme drop down, then adjust the volume size the way you want it, give each volume a name, selelct the format (usually Mac OS Extended), click on Install Mac OS 9 Disk Drivers (optional), then hit the Partition button. This should take just a few seconds and you should be good to go.

CCIE2B · Sep 2, 2003, 05:33 PM

If I am not mistaken, I thought Apple (and Dell) had the hard drives set to CS (Cable-Select) and the position of the drives on the cable was the deciding factor as to whether the drive was a master or slave.

CCIE2B

lunaticbunny · Sep 2, 2003, 08:10 PM

Originally posted by CCIE2B:
If I am not mistaken, I thought Apple (and Dell) had the hard drives set to CS (Cable-Select) and the position of the drives on the cable was the deciding factor as to whether the drive was a master or slave.

CCIE2B

nope, cable select does not work. even says so somwhere in the manual and online somewhere in their support pages. anyways, i gave up trying to format it in os x and booted into os9, took all about 3 seconds to initialize/format.