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Thain Esh Kelch · Jan 30, 2005, 10:20 AM

I just upgraded the stock drive on an iMac rev B, to a 30 Gb 5400 (4200?) rpm disk I took from a rev E G3 iMac.

First time it booted fine, started up from an OS9 disc, partioned the disk (7.5 Gb on the first partion) and updated disk-drivers, and started installing OS9. It crashed halfway through the installation. Wouldnt boot up after, powerbutton glowed orange, screen blank.

Next day it strangely booted fine. Wiped the drive again and installed OS9, went just fine. Restarted, but it wouldnt boot from the OS on the HD. (8.1 is minimum for rev a/b FYI) The iMac kept looking for a drive, displaying that folder with a questionmark on it. Restarted on the OS9 disc, made sure it had the primary disc selected in startupdisc controlpanel. No luck.
Popped OSX 10.3 disc in, booted up fine from it, and installed OSX. No problems here. The disc told me that I could install on the first partion, but not the second so thats fine.
Rebooted, iMac still couldnt find any systemfolder it could boot from.

Any suggestions, advice?

I find it strange that it crashed the first time and wouldnt reboot, suggesting an overheating of the processor. But strangely enough it ran fine for several hours after that!
Does anyone have ANY idea on what it could be? Otherwise I'll try to put another disc in the machine (20 Gb), and third the stock drive.. :/

Detrius · Jan 30, 2005, 11:17 AM

It's incredibly unlikely that your processor overheated. There are several other possibilities, like analog/video board or failing RAM.

BTW, did you set the drive to cable select or master? The drive must be set to master. Cable select is not supported on the vast majority of Macs (the MDD G4s being the only exception).

Thain Esh Kelch · Jan 30, 2005, 03:53 PM

I just set the drive to the exact same as the original drive, and I would expect that to be Master?

Thain Esh Kelch · Feb 1, 2005, 06:12 AM

*Sigh* Tried a 20 Gb drive instead, same things happened...

Then I put in the original drive, and it worked!!! How the HECK can that happen???

hudson1 · Feb 1, 2005, 07:14 AM

Check the partitions to be certain that your 7.5GB partition is really the first partition and that OS 9 was being installed there.

hudson1 · Feb 1, 2005, 07:20 AM

Also, do you know that the drive is good? If you haven't already done so, you might want to start over and do a low-level format, zeroing all data.

Thain Esh Kelch · Feb 1, 2005, 11:09 AM

Originally posted by hudson1:
Check the partitions to be certain that your 7.5GB partition is really the first partition and that OS 9 was being installed there.

OSX tells you under the installation if that isnt the case!

Anyway, I got it to work... Found out that jumper-settings for master/slave/etc was different for each brand!
They could have said so on the drives..

smic · Feb 3, 2005, 01:48 AM

wow i just upgraded my imac with a 120 gig and it was doing the exact same thing

i was almost ready to throw it thru the window

but hopefully mine is jumpers too

ill have to check tommorow, i had it set to master i think or master with slave present

but i did find jumper settings for all the drives is kinda messed up
because before, i had a 60gig in the imac and the 120 as a slave hanging outside of the case and the jumpers set up to cable select for it to be slave

but when i had a burner setup it was set to slave

and just if anyone is wondering i have a Y power cable and got an 18inch ide cable with 3 connectors that fit under the mobo and out the side, so i could hookup another drive

Thain Esh Kelch · Feb 3, 2005, 05:42 AM

Is the iMac still stable? I would expect having a heat problem with all those drives..

smic · Feb 3, 2005, 05:21 PM

ya its stable, the only thing i noticed with 2 hard drives hooked up, is i think there isnt enough power for both of them, when i was backing everything up i could hear one spin down for a second then spin back up
but with the burner it never had a problem burning anything

they heat wasn't an issue since they are wired outside of the case

and it did turn out to be jumpers, my imac didnt like having it set to master with slave present, but just set to master/single, strange really, i guess its kinda like guessing scsi settings

Thain Esh Kelch · Feb 3, 2005, 05:43 PM

lol - Well, you got it to work..

tooki · Feb 3, 2005, 10:26 PM

Originally posted by hudson1:
Check the partitions to be certain that your 7.5GB partition is really the first partition and that OS 9 was being installed there.

Mac OS 9 can be installed onto any partition. Only Mac OS X needs to be installed on the <8GB partition on this model.

tooki

hudson1 · Feb 4, 2005, 08:57 AM

Originally posted by tooki:
Mac OS 9 can be installed onto any partition. Only Mac OS X needs to be installed on the <8GB partition on this model.

tooki

I'm not an expert by any means but I think I recall from long ago that any bootable OS had to be installed in the first 8GB partition. That obviously wouldn't be necessary if you only used OS 9 in Classic mode and didn't boot into OS 9. Do I have this wrong?

tooki · Feb 4, 2005, 11:16 AM

You have it a bit wrong.

On the few machines with this limitation, only Mac OS X must be installed on a <8GB partition. Mac OS 9 can be installed on any size partition, and the machine will boot from it. The location of a Mac OS 9 folder for Classic can be on any read-write volume.

Here's my understanding of it: The 8GB limit has to do with the fact that the boot ROM in affected models was built to boot classic Mac OS and classic Mac OS only. Getting them to boot Mac OS X at all is a little bit of a hack. It's done by booting a bootloader, and somehow the bootloader imposes the 8GB limitation. Later models' boot ROMs are capable of directly booting Mac OS X, without the use of the bootloader (or at least they don't use it in the same way), so they don't suffer from the limitation.

tooki

Detrius · Feb 6, 2005, 12:47 PM

Originally posted by Thain Esh Kelch:
I just set the drive to the exact same as the original drive, and I would expect that to be Master?

This is likely your mistake. Different brands have different jumper settings. If you just copied the jumper settings, you may have completely confused the new hard drive.

Thain Esh Kelch · Feb 6, 2005, 02:15 PM

Originally posted by Detrius:
This is likely your mistake. Different brands have different jumper settings. If you just copied the jumper settings, you may have completely confused the new hard drive.

Originally posted by Thain Esh Kelch:
Anyway, I got it to work... Found out that jumper-settings for master/slave/etc was different for each brand!
They could have said so on the drives..

I found out..

tooki · Feb 6, 2005, 07:28 PM

Originally posted by Thain Esh Kelch:
Anyway, I got it to work... Found out that jumper-settings for master/slave/etc was different for each brand!
They could have said so on the drives..

I'm quite certain it does. Every drive (except those sold custom-labeled to computer companies like Apple) does have the jumper settings printed right on the label.

tooki