[Andrew]

Is it possible to install a hard disk from a wintel machine in a G4 (MacOS 8.6) and mount it?

How many bays/connectors are there for internal IDE hard drives?

The context is my mom has a wintel machine running MS WIN 3.1 and has purchased a G4. I am over 1,000 miles away and can't be there to help/read documentation. I would like for the transition to be as painless as possible. Ideally she would take her wintel hard drive out and place it in her Mac, upon booting, it would appear on her desktop with a PC on it and she could copy over her documents to the Mac drive.

Am I living in a Mac day dream? Is this possible? Someone with some experience?

Thanks in advance.
Drew

[tooki]

A G4, which by the way will either come with Mac OS 9, or upgradeable for <$20, has 3 hard drive bays, one of which is occupied by the original drive. There are a total of 4 IDE connectors, one each for the standard ATA/66 drive it comes with, the CD-ROM, DVD-ROM or DVD-RAM, and the optional internal zip drive. So you may have only one connector left. It should work, but honestly I would advise against it unless it's just to copy the files over real quick. A drive from the time of Windows 3.1 will be quite slow, and will slow the system down every time it is accessed (which Mac OS does regularly, even when not actually accessing user data on that drive).

I am not *certain* as to whether a FAT volume will mount, although I suspect it would. No software should be necessary. Again, I'd avoid using this as a long-term fix, but connecting it just to copy the files real quick should be fine.

In any case, you would need to know how to change the jumpers on the drive to set it to "slave" mode.

tooki

[Andrew]

tooki,

You're right in that this is just a baton handing off of data. No need for a ball & chain bottleneck reminder of past pain.

I understand there are some slavish issues in dealing with jumpers. I've dealt with tiny silvery stickers on SCSI drives and set ID numbers and termination before so I'm not too suprised or intimidated by it; and I actually have some faith that my parents kept and filed such information about whatever the old machine came with.

Any other settings besides slave/master?

Thank you.