[Waterman]

Hi.

I have a Pismo 500 MHz that I'm trying to squeeze a little more life out of. I purchased a Hitachi Travelstar 40GB hard drive since the stock 12GB was getting a bit cramped.

I installed it. Put my Panther CD in. Rebooted and held down the 'c' key. The CD/DVD drive started spinning up, but then the System Folder icon showed up and started flashing with a question mark. Then the CD drive spun down.

I've tried this a couple times just to make sure my drive was working, and it seems to work fine with the 12GB drive installed, but it won't boot off the CD with the 40GB drive in there. I took it to an Apple Genius who was not all that helpful.

Here's what I've tried so far:
- tried my OS 9, 10.1, 10.2 CDs
- reset PMU
- issued reset-nuram and reset-all commands from the open firmware prompt
- checked to make sure there were no jumpers on new HD
- reset PRAM
- left computer off / unplugged for 24 hours
- performed cermonial Hard Drive Upgrade dance

Please let me know if you have any ideas! I'm baffled as to why a new HD would prevent the computer from booting off the CD. Thanks in advance!

-waterman

[Hairllama]

Does the cd boot when holding "c" when the 12GB drive is in the Powerbook?

Is the cd drive an Apple original drive, or is it an aftermarket drive? I replaced my DVD drive with a combo unit and the Pismo wouldn't boot off of the CD when holding "c" until I soldered some pins to set it as master instead of slave.

Other than that I'm not sure what else it could be. Anybody else?

I guess you could boot up using the 12, use the control panel to set the cd as the boot drive, swap the hds and then try it.

ps-that ceremonial dance usually works

[Waterman]

Ooh. Good thought on that after market drive idea. It is indeed an after market drive, since my original CD/DVD module crapped out on me. Man, I'm having bad luck with optical drives. This one is a VST CD/DVD-ROM module.

How would I go about checking to see if mine is set as a master or slave?

I'll check to see if it boots from the CD with the 12GB installed. I guess if I can't boot from the CD with the 12GB installed then it would pretty much confirm it was a master/slave issue, huh?

Thanks for the tip.

[Waterman]

Hmm. I can't find the VST Tech website anymore. I was going to send them an email or scour their support pages to see if they had any ideas on how to make my CD/DVD module a Master instead of a Slave.

I'm pretty sure Hairllama was right about that one.

Has anyone done this before with a VST Tech CD/DVD module?

[dragnfly]

When I upgraded my Pismo HD, I had no problems. Also when I upgraded the stock DVD/CD drive to a combo drive.

But like a lot of users, the combo drive was defaulted to slave. I knew how to set it to master but was too lazy to do so. The only advantage was booting of a CD by pressing C.

But you can apparently also boot off the CD with a slave CD drive by using the key combination OPTION-CMD-SHIFT-DELETE at startup. This allows you to boot off an alternative source other than hard drive.

Hope that helps.

[Waterman]

Hey...

Thanks for the OPTION-CMD-SHIFT-DELETE suggestion, but that didn't work for me. It did a "safe boot" (took a long time to do it too).

I am sure the issue is the master/slave problem, since I found a number of others reporting problems with after market drives being set to slave by default. There is some solder-hack that you can do to change it from a slave drive to a master, but I don't really want to go down that road.

I'm going to look into Open Firmware commands to see if there's a way to tell it which IDE drive to use. I'll report back with the results. If anyone has any other suggestions, I'd very much appreciate it!

Thanks.