[BWSchultz]

Hi everyone,

I just purchased a new hard drive for my PMG5 1.8Ghz. It's a Maxtor 250 GB SATA, which I believe is the same as the current one in the upper bay. I'm running 10.3.4.

Here's what I have:

Upper Bay: 233.8 GB Maxtor 6Y250M0 (installed by Apple)
Lower Bay: 233.8 GB Maxtor 7Y250M0 (new)

Ok, I'm 99.9% sure I installed it correctly (it is really easy after all) but when I restarted the computer, I get the following error:

"You have inserted a disk containing no volumes that Mac OS X can read. To continue with the disk inserted, click ignore."

The options are Initialize... , ignore, and eject. (Don't know how I'm going to eject an internal disk...)

I go to disk utility to see what's wrong but everything looks right. When I highlight the two drives in DU, the only differences are that "Verify Disk Permissions" and "Repair Disk Permissions" are grayed out for the new drive. Also, the new drive has one extra piece of information: S.M.A.R.T status: verified. The original drive does not have this information.

So my G5 is recognizing the new drive... but OS X doesn't seem to like it. Anyone know why? I think it's identical to the original.

(On a side note, I hope someone in macnn land can help me because Apple won't. I'm outside of my 90 day window to receive help from them. I called tech support and they said I would have to pay $49 for phone help - rudely I might add. That ... is ... completely ... ridiculous. But wait, there's more. He said I could also pay $199 for an extended Apple Care plan. No way. My computer is way too expensive as it is to be paying some guy $5/min to help me. I hear Dell offers 2 or 3 YEARS for free...)

Thanks a lot for your help (and for listening to my rant),
Brent

[sith33]

You just need to initialize it. New drives usually come without a file system, because they could be used for mac, windows or a number of other systems. you should just need to do the initialize - just make sure you only initialize the new drive!

[Leonard]

yep, initialize it or format it and away you go....

[BWSchultz]

Thanks for writing back. Ok... I figured it out... turns out I had to "erase the disk" instead of "initialize it". Go figure.


And I'm spent...

[Randman]

Originally posted by BWSchultz:
Thanks for writing back. Ok... I figured it out... turns out I had to "erase the disk" instead of "initialize it".

Basically, for a new drive, erasing it is the same as initializing it.
And don't forget to repair permissions as well.

[Macola]

Originally posted by Randman:

And don't forget to repair permissions as well.

You can only repair permissions on a boot volume.

[Randman]

Originally posted by Macola:
You can only repair permissions on a boot volume.

Then I guess my external drives are also boot volumes because I can repair permissions on them.

[Lateralus]

Then I guess different rules might apply to externals. I have never been able to repair permissions on an internal non-boot volume.

[reader50]

You can repair permissions only on a drive / partition that has an OSX installation. The repair routine consults the Receipts that are left after software installations & updates, they contain reference info for the installed files, including the default permissions settings. The Receipts are located in:

/VolumeName/Library/Receipts/

If there is no OSX installation on the drive or partition in question, there can be no Library/Receipts folder, with no reference Receipts to obtain the permissions info from.

Permissions repairs only apply to files supplied by Apple or someone else's installer. Your personal files will retain whatever permissions you set on them.